Preview content of media or text-based files directly within lightbox without needing to download

I wish that if a media (image, video, pdf, etc) or text based file (.txt, .js, .doc, etc) that has been uploaded to an entity was clicked on, I could preview/read it’s contents directly within the fibery interface instead of having to download the file and open it locally every time!

The file being displayed in a lightbox-style popup is very common functionality that is present in virtually every other tool in the space.

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This could apply to all file types that could reasonably be previewed in the browser.

This is true. Images, videos & pdfs at least.

I think most browsers have a setting that allows you to choose whether to download or open files in the browser.

If a file is opened by the browser, it is no longer under Fibery’s control, so I don’t think it’s very easy to implement editing and saving back to the original file.

And there are no plans to make Fibery a native file editor.

Currently my behaviour is that it opens in a new tab, not downloads. Wondering if these is browser specific?
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That said, it still opens each in a new tab. I would see this like google drive deals with opening files which are not gdoc. It pops it open over the rest, then gives you the option to download and has arrows to go through the rest of the files in the folder.

And MS Onedrive does something similar.

But Fibery is not intended to be primarily used as a file storage service, nor as a tool for manipulating all the variety of file types that users might upload (doc, ppt, pdf, txt, png, svg, csv, xls, etc.)

I don’t think it ever will be (but never say never :wink:)

If you’re following the intended purpose it’s just a Product Management tool, no? :wink:
I’ve thought a lot about this, especially with the AI Assistant coming out now, and entity permissions which can make for granular folder sharing access. I’m not sure if the AI Assistant can read uploaded files, but that could be an interesting! An easier way to find files.

There could be something really powerful about each file as an entity.

Maybe I should have written that Fibery is not designed to function as a file storage.
There’s lots that goes into good file management (including indexing/searching within contents, version history, in-browser editing, etc.) and Fibery is just not technically set up to do that.
Of course, nothing is impossible, but at the moment, it is improbable.

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Yeah, we have no intention for using Fibery for mass file storage.

But for the files we do store, it would be nice to have certain functionality you come to expect from product/project management tools like viewing media (images, videos, pdf) natively without needing to download.

The specific scenario that prompted me to create this thread is that we use Test Cafe (https://testcafe.io/) to create automated testing for various products we build. Test Cafe creates a .js file with instructions on what steps will be completed in the test. We save that file on a “Test Scenario” entity within Fibery, and then using a script we wrote that’s triggered by a “Run Test” button, send that file to our testing server that executes it.

The js file is just plain text, and it’s easy to tell by looking in it, what the parameters of the test are. I often forget what the parameters are and want to double check them before I run the test, but currently I have to download the file and open it when i wish I could just click on it and see it’s contents in a little lightbox window or something.

Have you checked your browser settings?
For me, I can set it to open files in the browser rather than download, as the default option.

I’m sure I could change my browser settings to try and open the file within the browser, but it doesn’t scale (I’m not going to make everyone else in my company change their browser settings) and at the end of the day still takes me away from Fibery when the whole point is to stay within Fibery.

Not trying to minimize the effort here as I don’t know how Fibery is built, but there’s an abundance of react and javascript snippets out there for basic lightbox functionality which is all that’s really needed for images/videos. Fibery truly is the only tool in the space that doesn’t seem to use a lightbox to preview media natively before download.

My original ask was around around text-based files though, which would essentially just require displaying the value of in a lightbox, which something like colorbox (a very popular js-based lightbox solution) seems like it could do without issue.