Hello Nextclouders! I’m trying to migrate to Nextcloud for file storage for my organization. I’m a media preservationist dealing with high-resolution scans of filmstrips (a format very few people remember, and subsequently, no one else is saving) and adjacent resources like digitized soundtracks, videos of restored filmstrips, and so on. As I also have to create engaging content for social media, livestreams, etc. I’m also hoping to automate some stuff through Nextcloud. I’m okay with PHP programming, Python, stuff like that, but I’m lost when it comes to Vue.js and newer frameworks, plus I’m having trouble finding what I need in the docs. I’d appreciate any help I can get - including volunteers to help me develop what I need, as this is essentially a labor of love operating at a loss - even if it’s just a point in the right direction.
I thought I’d start with what I thought would be a simple app, plugging in a Python script (which I could also rewrite as a shell script using ffmpeg if necessary) that creates a slideshow of frames for social media when announcing I’ve uploaded a filmstrip to the Internet Archive. I can already do this with a local folder of files, but what I’m hoping to do is select a bunch of scans in a folder in Nextcloud (clicking the checkboxes to the left of each file) and then click a custom menu item in the “…” menu or by right-clicking in the file explorer to start the conversion, and drop the resultant file in the same directory. But I feel like I’ve dug through the docs, Googled until my head hurt, and asked ChatGPT a dozen different ways, and it seems like there’s no way in the Nextcloud API to return a list of selected files.
That’s weird to me because there are built-in functions like “Download,” “Delete Files,” and “Move or Copy,” that operate on only the selected files. But I can’t figure out how to make that work for custom code. AI coding tools are similarly confused (which indicates they haven’t been trained on Nextcloud docs or can’t find it by searching), and default to random sniffing of the page DOM, which has not been reliable and seems to work randomly and then not work.
Two things keep coming up in my searches that are also pain points: First, there’s an old app that would already do exactly what I’m doing called “Files Actions,” but it’s been abandoned and only ever worked up to Nextcloud 28. It allowed an admin to create a script that ran on selected files, exactly what I need, but I don’t know enough to take over development as it seems something happened a few years ago where Nextcloud handles file selection differently. There’s also another app whose name I can’t recall that does essentially the same thing, but it requires Lua to be installed in NC, which I can’t make work, and GitHub seems to indicate that Lua has been impossible to install in NC since January of this year. I’m using the Nextcloud AIO Docker container, which I understand also complicates the installation of Lua.
I have some more ideas for custom code that would help me more efficiently work with the files that I have, so knowing how to access selected files and add a menu item would be very helpful to me in the long run. I’m a sole proprietor so any improvements I can make to my efficiency directly translates into being able to save more rare films. I know I’m not an expert senior PHP developer, and I understand sometimes going on the Internet to ask for help with stuff like this offends more talented developers, but I hope someone here can point me in the right direction.