Box Drive should preview files in windows explorer or Finder
There is a feature in Windows Explorer that allows you to enable a preview pane that previews the contents of files inside of the explorer window. This does not work on files that are in Box Drive even for files that have been opened before.
Jasmine Wade
shared this idea
This is a feature we would love to get to, but unfortunately it is not on our short term roadmap. Please continue adding your feedback!
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Anonymous
commented
7 years later and this feature still hasn't been added. We were using a much smaller cloud storage competitor before moving to Box and were very disappointed to find out that while file previews in file explorer were working with the file streaming client of our previous cloud storage provider, this feature is missing with no expectations of this feature being added after moving to a bigger platform.
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Anonymous
commented
Many of our users rely on this feature, and our previous storage service had it (SecuriSync) without needing to download all the files locally.
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Anonymous
commented
I think this will never be a feature in Windows because the preview handler requires the physical file to be present then asks the relevant application to generate a preview from that file. Box Drive would need to be downloading each file first, and that seems unlikely and slow.
The alternative would be Box making a separate utility that can generate file previews from the files stored on their server, then presenting the user with that preview. It would probably only be available for select file types though, but even previews for just .pdfs, Office files, .txt files etc would be a huge improvement.
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Anonymous
commented
This is a major shortcoming. I rely on this extensively as I'm sure others do, and not having it inherently increases the amount of time it takes to find a given file. Box is not feasible as a replacement for a network server, but that's what we are stuck with.
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Anonymous
commented
I have had multiple customer requests for this feature, please revisit if possible!
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Daniel Feodoroff
commented
FYI, update Box Drive to FPE Drive and Quick Look for files is supported 🥳
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Anonymous
commented
Okay. It is 2021. Please put it on the list of things to do. Thank you much.
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Anonymous
commented
This seems like an obvious failure for BOX drive. This feature is commonplace in other cloud services and was even available with BOX sync. Not being able to quickly preview files and being forced to open them to see their contents (especially image-based files) is a real setback to efficiency and productivity. PLEASE REVISIT THIS SUGGESTION.