If you have the Dropbox program installed on your Windows computer, you can adjust its settings to change how it works for you.
If you’d like to adjust the general settings for your Dropbox account, you’ll need to go to the Dropbox website. Our Settings on Dropbox.com tutorial has more information.
Adjusting your Settings in Dropbox for Windows
Start by clicking the Dropbox icon (
) in the toolbar in the lower-right corner of your desktop screen, clicking the settings icon (
), and then clicking Preferences.
There are five different categories of settings; click on one to see the settings in that category.
General
This category allows you to adjust how your Dropbox access program behaves overall.
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Show Desktop Notifications — This allows you to select whether or not the Dropbox program displays a brief message on your desktop screen whenever a file or folder is added to, changed on, or deleted from your Dropbox account. If these messages get annoying after a while, click the check box to unmark it.
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Start Dropbox On System Startup — This allows you to select whether or not the Dropbox program runs automatically when you turn on your computer. We recommend that you leave this box marked, so that you don’t have to find the Dropbox program and start it yourself every time your computer boots up.
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Language — This allows you to choose what language the Dropbox program displays in. You can choose to use the same language that you use for your operating system, or you can pick a different one.
Account
This category allows you to change how your Dropbox access program interacts with your actual Dropbox account.
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Location — Shows where your “Dropbox folder” is on your computer, and allows you to move it somewhere else, if you wish.
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Selective Syncing — Allows you to choose which folders in your Dropbox account will update additions, changes, and removal of the files/folders inside to their latest versions in the Dropbox access program on the particular device that you’re using. This may be useful if you’re only going to be using certain files on a certain device and don’t want to take up too much hard drive space with files and folders that you aren’t going to be using on that device.
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Account Linking — Allows you to choose which Dropbox account your Dropbox program for Windows connects to. This may be useful if you have more than one Dropbox account (for example, a work one and a personal one), or in the unfortunate circumstance that there is a problem with your Dropbox account and you need to create a new one. In the latter case, this allows you to easily switch your Dropbox program for Windows over to the new account without having to re-install it.
Import
This category allows you to control settings related to automatically putting pictures and videos into your “Dropbox folder”.
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Import Photos and Videos to Dropbox — This takes you to a place where you can change your settings regarding what to do when a storage device (such as a USB flash stick, camera, camcorder, or external hard drive) is connected to your computer. You can set your computer up to automatically put files from that storage device directly into your “Dropbox folder”.
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Enable Camera Uploads — If you connect a camera to your computer, this allows you to choose whether the Dropbox access program is allowed to take photo and video files off your camera and put them in your “Dropbox folder”, or just photo files.
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Share Screenshots — If you click this box to mark it, when you take a screen shot (by pressing the “Print Screen” key), the Dropbox program will automatically turn it into a photo file and save it in your “Dropbox folder”.
Bandwidth
This category’s settings have to do with how much computer processing power the Dropbox program is allowed to use when you use it to upload files to your Dropbox account, or download them from your Dropbox account. These are advanced settings that you probably won’t use too much.
Proxies
This category of settings allows you to configure Dropbox with a proxy server, which is a way for one or more computers to connect to the Internet without putting each of those computers at risk for getting viruses and other nasty stuff. Again, these are advanced settings that you probably won’t be using.
Well, those are all the settings that you can change in your Dropbox program for Windows!
