You put a free Lightroom preset pack in your YouTube description. The video does well. A week later you want to know: how many people actually downloaded the presets? Which countries are they in? Did the link get passed around a Telegram group?
If you shared a plain Dropbox link, you can't answer any of those questions. Here's why, and how to fix it in a few minutes without moving your files.
Why Dropbox can't tell you who downloaded your presets
Dropbox used to have a feature called Traffic & Insights that showed views and downloads on shared files. It was only on Professional and higher business plans, and Dropbox retired it in 2021.
What's left is viewer info. Depending on your plan, you may see that a file was viewed and when. But anyone who opens a public shared link without being signed in to your team shows up as an anonymous guest. You don't get a name, an email, a location, or a download count. On the free Basic plan you get no insight at all into who opened a shared link.
For a preset creator, that's the whole problem. Your audience arrives through public links, so they're all guests.
What about link shorteners?
A common workaround is wrapping the Dropbox link in a Bitly-style short link and checking its click stats. It's better than nothing, but it counts clicks, not downloads. Someone who clicks twice counts twice. Someone who copies the raw Dropbox URL from the redirect and shares it skips your counter entirely. And a shortener can't stop anyone from opening the file.
Tracking preset downloads with Passdropit
Passdropit sits in front of your existing Dropbox or Google Drive link. Your .xmp or .dng files stay exactly where they are. You share a passdropit.com/yourslug link instead, and every visit goes through Passdropit before it reaches the file. That's what makes tracking possible.
Here's the setup:
- Create a free account at passdropit.com.
- Click Create New Link and connect the Dropbox file or folder with your presets, or paste a Google Drive link.
- Pick a custom slug that matches the pack, like
passdropit.com/moody-film-presets. - Optional: add a password. More on that below.
- Put the Passdropit link in your video description, link-in-bio, or community post instead of the Dropbox URL.
From then on, your dashboard shows how many times the link was used, day by day. On Pro you also get the IP address, city and country for each access, and you can turn on an email notification every time someone opens the link.
What the data actually tells you
Download numbers are more useful than they sound. A few things preset creators learn quickly:
- Which video drives downloads. Use a separate Passdropit link per video. If your golden-hour tutorial gets 3x the downloads of your street-photo tutorial, you know what to make next.
- Where your audience is. Location data often surprises people. If most of your downloads come from Indonesia or the Philippines, that's a reason to add captions or time your uploads for those time zones.
- When a link leaks. A sudden spike from one country, days after your video peaked, usually means someone reposted your link in a group or forum.
- Whether a paid upsell is worth it. If a free pack gets thousands of downloads, a premium pack has a real audience waiting.
Add a password to make the numbers honest
Tracking tells you a link is spreading. A password stops it from spreading in the first place.
Say the password out loud near the end of your tutorial, or post it in a members-only community tab. People who watched the video get in. People who found the link pasted somewhere else hit a password screen. Your download count now reflects your real audience, not whoever scraped the link.
We covered this in more detail in how to prevent your Dropbox link from being shared beyond your audience.
An example: a free preset pack launch
You release 10 free mobile presets as .dng files alongside a new tutorial. You create passdropit.com/film-pack-free, set the password filmfan, and mention it at the 8-minute mark of the video.
After the first week, your dashboard shows 1,240 downloads. Most come in the first 48 hours, which matches your video's view curve. The top countries are Indonesia, the US and India. On day 9 there's a jump of 300 attempts from one country with no matching rise in video views, so someone reposted the link. Because the link has a password, most of those visitors never got the files.
Now you know three things a Dropbox link would never have told you: how big your real audience is, where they are, and that the pack is popular enough for someone to try to redistribute it.
Get notified instead of checking
If you'd rather not open the dashboard every day, Pro can email you whenever the link is accessed. That's handy for a client delivery or a small paid drop where every download matters. See how to get notified when your link is accessed for the setup.
What it costs
Creating protected links, setting a password and seeing basic download stats are free. Location data, per-access IP logs, email notifications and expiring links are part of Pro at $5/month. Your files stay in Dropbox or Google Drive either way, so there's nothing to re-upload.
If your presets are worth sharing, they're worth knowing who's downloading them. Create your first tracked link on Passdropit.