how to remove Dropbox green blobs

Oct 24

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Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 15.32.36

UPDATE: this method should no longer be necessary. See the Comments below for the latest.

If like me, you’re not impressed with Dropbox drawing huge green blobs all over your Finder windows without even asking, here’s a great tip from Zackary Corbett for getting rid of them. Run the following line in Terminal:

pluginkit -e ignore -i com.getdropbox.dropbox.garcon

And you’ll be blessed with some visual peace and quiet:
Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 15.33.25
If you want to reverse the effect and enjoy the green blobs again, use this line:

pluginkit -e use -i com.getdropbox.dropbox.garcon

Thanks Zachary 🙂

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About philastokes

Independent Software Developer, Technical Writer and Researcher at SentinelOne. Explaining the unexplainable with images, video and text. Scripting anything imaginable in AppleScript, Bash, Python and Swift.

Posted on October 24, 2014, in Finder, Terminal and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.

  1. beatrixwillius | November 16, 2014 at 10:59

    The tip worked great for a while. But since a few days it works only a few moments and then the ugly green blobs show up again.

    • philastokes | November 16, 2014 at 11:05

      Hi, yeah, I noticed that, too.

      You could try disabling the Dropbox Finder extension here:

       > System Preferences > Extensions

      Update: apparently Dropbox have added an option in Dropbox Preferences to disable Finder integration. You’ll need v2.10.49 or later.

      They’re claiming it’s a bug in Yosemite. Personally, I’m unhappy with the amount of unauthorized changes the Dropbox.app makes behind the scenes anyway, and so I’ve uninstalled it.

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