Option to disable metadata for external shares

[RenWal]

It seems that when the metadata panel in the sidebar is opened for an external file, that file is immediately downloaded from the remote server and the download continues even if the panel is closed before completion.

If you have an incoming share with very large files, like mpeg videos, and run your nextcloud instance locally (i.e. self-host at home), this will exhaust your downlink bandwidth (and put unnecessary load on the remote server). I could not find a way to cancel that download, except killing the PHP worker.

I thus suggest adding a configuration option to disable the metadata display for federated shares or at least for files larger than a specific limit.

[gino0631]

Sorry for the troubles.

Small external files are probably not a problem, only the large ones. Do you have an idea what default size limit could be implemented for external files?

[RenWal]

Small files are perfectly fine. I know that Ubuntu's nautilus avoids automatically querying remote files larger than 10MB by default. Assuming (blindly) someone self-hosting nextcloud has at least 20Mbit downlink, this would cause 4 seconds of full network load, which I would deem acceptable. A quick dirstat shows that 98% of my DSLR's jpegs and 99% of all files living in my nextcloud storage are smaller than 10MB. But in the end, that's only my specific use case, maybe other users with different usage patterns can comment on this as well.

The largest (non-raw) images (which I use the metadata tool the most for) I could find are about 15MB large, but I wouldn't mind if the metadata panel would make me click an extra button for those rare cases. Maybe the panel could show some warning like "To show metadata, we'll need to fetch this file from the remote server. This is a large file. Do you want to proceed?"

[gino0631]

@RenWal thanks for the very valuable input, I'll take a look.