Feature Request: Publish to Dropbox

Ah, I missed the part about local drive and external drive. On our team, we have synched DB folders on our external drives only. I keep next to nothing on my computer's drive except software, cache, etc. We export directly to our external drives' DB folders and it automatically backs up to DB online. No duplicates, no versioning issues. If you replace it via the web interface, it synches to your drive. We each have terabytes upon terabytes of files synched to a central team location. You can even have folders online that aren't synched to your external drive but can be at the click of a button. So, stuff synched that is both online/offline, stuff that is "online only" but you can see the files on your external drive, and stuff that's "online only" that isn't synched to your external drive but can be.

As far as sharing immediately, you can share access to a subfolder that your company's social media manager (or whoever) can synch to their external drive's DB, so when you export, and it synches to the cloud, it will automatically push to their external drive's folder as well (because it's the same folder on two different drives).

If you're sharing files with clients, you can right-click the file and "share" or "copy DB link" and send that, choosing whether you want them to be able to view only or be able to download. If they're not on your team they can only see the one file you link to. You can also now right-click and choose "Get feedback via DB Replay" (Adobe Admins please don't boot me for recommending that vs. Frame.io). 

Step 1: Make friends with your team/department/company's DB Admin. 

I have many files and folders synced with Dropbox on my local hard drive, but I don't like to keep duplicates of existing files.  When I export from Premiere Pro, I save it to external storage.  There's no advantage having a second copy of that file in my Dropbox folder.  So I will upload that file from the external storage into an online-only folder on Dropbox (one that isn't synced with my local machine).

I understand what you're saying about saving the file into a Dropbox system folder and then making it online-only.  Perhaps that is a useful solution in this situation.  Although personally I'd prefer to remove the step of having the media file on my system drive, and retain it only on the external storage.

I guess another reason I'd like to see a 'Publish To Dropbox' feature is the scenario where the Dropbox account isn't your own, but is somebody elses.  Imagine you are a video editor and you want your finished export to immediately land on the hard drive of your company's social media manager, who works remotely.  If you had the option to publish to Dropbox (whether it be a personal account, or a corporate/shared account) you could send it to Dropbox's cloud storage immediately after export, and it instantly syncs onto their hard drive.  You yourself wouldn't need to have that other person's Dropbox account synced onto your own computer.  (Again, I see how 'shared folders' achieves a similar thing.  But my main purpose here is to avoid having media files on the system drive, and instead just let them exist on the higher-performance media drive where Dropbox isn't already synced to).

On a Mac, if you right-click on the file in your local drive, you can choose the Dropbox contextual menu option "Make online-only" and then it won't take up any space on your drive. Not sure how similar the process is on a PC.

Are you saying you have no DB folder on your local drive synched to DB, and you  manually drag files into online folders via the web interface?