Link previews

When you paste a Markdrop link into Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X or iMessage, the app shows a preview card. Markdrop draws that card for each document, and it shows only what a stranger opening the link could already see.

For a document anyone with the link can open, the card has:

• the title, or the document's opening heading, or else its address;
• the first lines of the text, as plain text;
• a reading time, like "4 min read";
• the address, like markdrop.in/q3-plan.

For a file, the card shows the title (or the file name), its type and size. A video that anyone with the link can open also shows its poster frame.

The page's own title and description, which some apps show instead of the card, follow the same rules.

Anything a stranger couldn't open gets a card with no content: no title, no text, nothing from the document except the address the link already shows. The card says only what kind of lock it has, such as "Private document" or "Password-protected document". That covers documents that are:

• set to Only people added or to a workspace team;
• protected by a password;
• in a workspace where visitors must sign in;
• end-to-end encrypted.

An encrypted document's title and text are ciphertext to Markdrop, so its card reads "Encrypted document" and nothing more. A link to a document that doesn't exist, or has expired, gets a plain Markdrop card that doesn't say whether it ever existed.

A document filed in a workspace wears that workspace's brand on its card, its site name and accent colour, wherever the link is pasted. A workspace can also hide the Markdrop name from its cards. See Brand your workspace.

For a document strangers can't open, the workspace's branding shows only when the link is on the workspace's own domain, like docs.acme.com/…. On a markdrop.in link, even the workspace's name would be more than a stranger could learn, so it's left off.

Each time an app fetches a card, Markdrop notes which app asked: Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, X, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, or another. It counts as a share signal in your analytics, never as a view, and repeat fetches from the same app within 10 minutes count once. See What gets counted.

Edit the document's title, or its opening heading and first lines. Apps refetch cards on their own schedule, so a new paste can take a few minutes to show the change, and old pastes keep their old card.

• Who can open what
• End-to-end encryption
• Passwords and expiry