Search in public shared folders and option for disabling the Download button

Hello. First time here, so let me start by saying “Thank you” for NextCloud!

If such a thing exists, I missed it horribly in the interface, when searching the apps and when googling (feel free to point me in right direction): is there a way to activate the search in a publicly shared folder, for the visitors I mean?

Such a feature would make NC also a great download manager: think about it, you have a lot of docs/imgs/whatever, properly categorized in folders, you share them and are easily managed. You link to the directory or a sub-directory from your website. But your public visitors can’t FIND anything per se.

Also on per publicly shared directory basis it would be great if we could disable the “Download” (as a zip) button in such a scenario. So that the visitors would be able to download only specific (found, sic!) files and not the whole directory. Because usually people need just a pdf form, a book, an image, a document and not the whole knowledge of the universe. Does it make sense?

Tags will also be a plus. An inline download counter near the files? Sure :slight_smile:

Started implementing NC in our university and this would be a great addition, to ease the load and streamline the (many) websites. There are a lot of documents that are made public, managed by a lot of people and there is nothing as good as NextCloud if it would sport such a feature. And I think that other NC users will find themselves in a similar situation and consider this useful.

I already found such a feature request and commented there Enable search for not-logged users in shared folders · Issue #1794 · nextcloud/server · GitHub

Thanks!

3 Likes

@jospoortvliet Can you please drop a word on this, is this feasible, and would you consider this? I think I made a pretty good case :star_struck:

I commented :wink:

I see some issues with the search idea, it would only be secure/private if it only searched in the single share and then - well, that is only useful with very large ones. Not crazy but a corner case, not sure who would want to develop that. Of course, if you do, or your university needs it and can pay for it, that’s totally cool :wink:

wrt the removing the download button or showing a download counter, those are features - yeah, could be done as an app for example. That would be interesting - again, if somebody is interested in doing it, there are people they can ask for help (eg @nickvergessen can certainly give some hints to how to write a download counter). Or - yes, we could do this for a customer, not hard to do.

Of course, the search should run only in that share, but for me it’s not such particular case. I mean, it’s like 50/50: you have a large share or a small one, of course everyone has a lots of smaller shares, but a public one, usually it’s bigger. And if you have a large one, you hit this difficulty where the visitor would have to navigate and visually find the file. Think about a gallery - it is easy. Now think about 500 boring pdfs - not so easy.

The global “Download” button it’s even a bigger issue, as I said, one usually needs “something” in such a scenario, not “everything”. I was wishing for a option called “Only allow per item download” in public shares.

I understand completely what you are saying, what would something like that involve? Something of a subscription? This one will surely not be feasible - we still use like 2009ish servers and the budgets for IT don’t really exist for now…
But a one time job? Sounds more like it.

We only do consulting for customers with a subscription but you can of course look in the freelancing part of this forum to try to find somebody who could write it. Most of what you want is totally doable by somebody with some experience in Nextcloud coding.