I was looking for a multimedia content sharing solution to perform some sort of e-library function in a hosted server.
I would like to upload documents, e-books, presentation slides, audio files, video files, and the like to the system. Those content then can be accessible by particular persons and/or group of persons that I assigned permission with. They should be able to open the content directly in web browser in their desktop, tablet or mobile phone. For editable content such as text files, MS Office documents, LibreOffice documents, etc., they should be able to edit the file directly in the web browser, if I give them the "edit" permission.
First thing I thought of was Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or similar cloud drive available in the Internet. However, those services will have stringent quota limitation, less flexible for me to control users and access rights, and does not have certain feature that I need.
Then, I looked into ownCloud, Nextcloud, and the like. They are a bit too complicated for both the users and administrator. They contain excessive features and functions that I don't need. Worse still, I found that they have little bugs here and there which I couldn't resolve nor found workable solution in the Internet.
Finally, I settled down with FileRun which run in LAMP environment. It is simple, easy to use, and has a nice user interface.
It even has special handling for photos and audio/music by making use of the metadata embedded in those multimedia files. I hope that in the future version, this can be extended to video files too.
Installation of FileRun to an existing LAMP platform is pretty easy too. There are 2 files to download:
- Click here to download the latest version of FileRun.
- Click here to download its installation script called unzip.php.
After download, rename the FileRun zip file to just FileRun.zip without version number in its filename.
Upload both FileRun.zip and unzip.php to a web-accessible folder in your web server.
Use your web browser to access to unzip.php in your web server, and follow the step-by-step instruction to complete your installation.
You can even install FileRun in Synology DiskStation and RackStation NAS. Click here for the instruction to install FileRun on Synology network attached storage.
With FileRun, you can manage and organize your files, tag them for easier searching, bookmark certain files into your collections and/or starred folder.
You can share your folders and files to other users and groups in FileRun, and determine whether they can perform upload, download, make changes, share links, read comments, or add comments.
You can also create weblinks to share files or folders to be accessible by other FileRun users or external users without any FileRun account in your system.
You can put an expiration date for your weblink, limit its download, set a password before the linked file can be accessed, require user login before the linked file can be accessed, etc.
I find FileRun very suitable for simple e-library system for file sharing and content collaboration in self-hosted server. You can even access your files directly from Windows Explorer via WebDAV. It even has a Mozilla Thunderbird FileLink addon to enable you to send large file in your email.
