Context Menu entries for Dropbox ignore

These registry entries add Context Menu (i.e. right click) options to Dropbox files and folders in Windows File Explorer to ignore (or un-ignore) files and folders.

Compatibility

• Windows 11
• Windows 10
• Windows 7 (should work, but has not been tested)

Installation

Download and run InstallContextMenuEntries.reg and merge the entries into your registry. I strongly encourage you to examine the contents of the file with a text editor BEFORE merging the entries, as you should do with any script you find on the internet!

Uninstallation

Download and run UninstallContextMenuEntries.reg and merge the entries into your registry.

Usage

To have Dropbox ignore a file or folder, right-click it and choose Ignore from Dropbox. To stop ignoring a file or folder, right-click it and choose Un-Ignore from Dropbox. These context menu entries will only be present within your Dropbox folder.

Ignoring a file or folder differs from using Dropbox's built-in Selective Sync in that ignored files/folders will remain on your device but will not be tracked, whereas folders excluded using Selective Sync will be removed from your device (as this is typically a way to avoid downloading the folder to your device as a way to avoid bandwidth and/or disk capacity usage).

If you ignore a folder, Dropbox will also ignore all files and subfolders within that folder. If a folder is ignored before files are added to that folder, those files will not be present in your Dropbox account and will not count against your Dropbox capacity limit.

Known Limitations

• Requires Dropbox to be installed at C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox for the icons to properly show in the Context Menu. If Dropbox is installed somewhere else, the context menu entries will still work, they will just have placeholder images instead of the Dropbox icon.
• A momentary powershell window popup will sometimes occur while the script is running to ignore/un-ignore a file or folder.
• Because the context menu only shows for folders that include "\Dropbox" in the path, the context menu entries will also show if you right click a file or folder within the Dropbox installation directory (or within any other folder named "Dropbox"). Ignoring or un-ignoring files or folders in the installation directory will not do anything, as Dropbox only observes the Dropbox folder for changes, not its installed location.
• I have not figured out a good way to only show the "Un-Ignore" entry if the file or folder is currently being ignored, and vice versa. If anyone has an idea of how to do this, please feel free to submit a PR!