Download Files Directly to Dropbox Using Chrome

With a steadily growing regularity, we are using the cloud to store and access our files. Services like Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft’s Skydrive, Box and Dropbox have transformed the way we look at storage. Granted, the services can, and do occasionally, go down, and it happens without warning and sometimes at rather inopportune times. But most boast somewhere in the neighborhood of 99-percent uptime, making them more reliable that many home networks. All are also redundant, meaning files do not get lost â€" they are mirroed with multiple copies to ensure protection.

The biggest problem may well be father time â€"it consumes time and bandwidth to get your files up to that cloud. When bandwidth is scarce it can become especially vexing. That’s shown loud and clear when you download a file online and then wish to store it on Dropbox, which means uploading what you have just finished receiving.

There is a better way â€" a Chrome extension called Download to Dropbox can improve the experience and save you more than half the time (remember that upstream is generally slower than downstream).

Once you’ve installed the app, an easy process in Chrome, a new icon will appear on your menu bar, showing an arrow pointing down to an open box. lick this, and you will be whisked away to the Dropbox page, There you will be asked to authorize the app to access your account (you will likely need to login first).

As far as options go, there are a few of those also. Head to settings and hit extension, scroll down to the Dropbox one and hit the link for “options”.

There isn’t much here, as you can see in the above image. You can show the folder that files download to and also switch your Dropbox account, if you happen to have more than one.

As far as actually using the app, you will find it easy enough. Simply right-click the file you want (you can grab images from web sites as well) and choose the Dropbox option.

There are countless Chrome apps and extensions that can interact with your cloud storage destination of choice. Download to Dropbox is only one, but if this happens to be your storage solution then this the right one. Its simple to use and doesn’t hog Chrome resources, making it an ideal solution.