Seafile v13.0 development updates and major innovative features

Announcement
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Seafile v13.0 is currently in active development, with an anticipated beta release by the end of October. This thread serves as a living document to showcase our progress and key features.

While v12.0 focus on UI redesign and documentation rewritten, v13.0 focus on innovative new features.

Major new features includes:

  1. Extended file properties
  2. Multiple view types for file display
  3. Hierarchical tag management

Other features

  1. SeaSearch will become production ready and support full text search
  2. SeaDoc will be version 2.0 and including AI integrations

Extended file properties

You can add metadata such as collaborators, expiration dates, and file descriptions, enriching file information for better organization. And you can also filter, sort, and search files based on properties, allowing for quick access and improved retrieval efficiency.

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Multiple view types for file display

  • Create table, gallery, kanban, and map views based on file properties, providing different perspectives for more versatile file visualization.
  • Customize views with filtering, sorting, grouping, and hidden properties to tailor file presentation to specific needs, improving efficiency.
  • Add multiple uniquely named views to switch seamlessly between work scenarios, enhancing file management flexibility.

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Hierarchical Tag Management

  • Enable “Tags” to categorize files and search by tags for quick filtering and retrieval.
  • Centrally manage tags with options to edit, delete, create sub-tags, and structure a clear tagging system for better file classification.

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7 Likes
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Does it mean we can store posix filesystem extended attributes like owner, permissions, selinux labels? So that direct backups of anything will be possible.

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This is possible in theory. But we are not sure how many people need such a feature.

Currently we focus adding extended attributes via the web interface instead of syncing from local operating system.

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Are the following things sure to improve?

Video thumbnail generation
Wiki sharing via a public or private link to non-users of the server, with or without a password

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Sad to hear. I’m not aware of a good continuous backup option for linux and recording file attributes would allow for it. Also could be very nice for regular point in time backups but would require additional work on the client side and existing solutions like borg etc. are good.

Thanks for the clear answer though!

@WhisperWarlord , for pics/video gallery check immich. It’s amazing to see what it can done in terms of reencoding and AI with hardware acceleration, smart search, etc. Seems like seafile primary focus is on files which is kind of expected. It’s huge to make a gallery. But seeing an integration between seafile and immich would be truly awesome.

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In version 12.0, you can already do the two things

  • private sharing: share Wiki with another user or group
  • public sharing: publish a Wiki with a custom URL
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I agree with private sharing: share Wiki with another user or group but not for public sharing: publish a Wiki with a custom URL I haven’t found a way to create a personalized share link to share a wiki as a file with specific permissions. With password for exemple.

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Hello, I’m a relatively new user and I’m still kicking the tires mostly. Although I’ve spent quiet some time at the setup part. Started with Seafile 11, presently running v12 community.

I want to provide some (hopefully) constructive feedback about what I see as a project direction.

I chose Seafile because of its performance, stability and space efficiency (deduplication). This functionality is great. Thank you for that!

My concern is that reading through v12 and v13 updates it looks like the development focus is on features like SeaDoc and SeaSearch while core functionalities for a file management platform are a little neglected.

I’ve been hooking up a friend with around 1TB archive on my server. He wanted to search for some files within a directory. But it turns out one can only search within the whole library and cannot even search within a directory tree. (eventually I installed him the native mac drive app and it seems to do the job reasonably well, but obviously full-text search wouldn’t work if this was pro).

Another issue is that the results are returned in something like a window that disappears once an item is clicked and I see no button to go back to the search list. i.e. there is no simple way to go through the matches to see what is actually relevant.

Another thing is that when the directory is very deep in the tree, the tree view doesn’t allow to see where is that in the tree. Also the view at the top doesn’t allow for this. There doesn’t seem to be hover text or some other approach to clearly see where is this in the path.

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Talking about core functionality, it would be very useful to support other protocols like FTP or S3.

I mean other functionality is all fine and I assume you know better what your paying customers want.

Just to me it appears to make more sense to focus on core stuff. Then integrate with mature project for the other things. Hard things I mean, e.g. sphinx/manticore for full-text search, immich for gallery, whatever for document online editing and collaboration, etc. Because you are one team and can spread only so much.

btw if you support S3 API, that may in fact enable many other integrations because it is really popular (e.g. immich/gallery, CDNs, etc.). FTP integration may work amazing for cameras/DVRs for example.

Another core thing might be deduplication across libraries. So that things might be organized in a convenient way and duplicated when desired for better collaboration, searching or archival.

I know what it is to work for open source so please don’t take as a criticism. Just telling you my perspective as a user and as whatever experience I have developing projects.

Thank you for the good work!

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There is a publish a Wiki feature as shown below:

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Password protected publishing is not supported yet.

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Thanks for the feedback. We are looking into the " There doesn’t seem to be hover text or some other approach to clearly see where is this in the path".

Can you provide more regarding the search feature? Do you mean full-text search cannot work in pro edition?

Improving file search experience is what we are working on right now. Here is a screenshot showing advanced search features that will be available in version 13.0 pro edition:

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Maybe the problem you encountered is a limitation of community edition?

Regarding FTP or S3 support, we don’t have a plan to support FTP protocol.

For S3 support, Seafile support using S3 as storage backend. I don’t see the need to providing S3 interface in Seafile on top of S3 as storage backend yet.

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Thank you, Are you planning to release the password protection option soon? Or in version 13?

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This is not within our plan yet. If you need it very much, you can consider to sponsor the development of such a feature.

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There doesn’t seem to be hover text or some other approach to clearly see where is this in the path

I have attached a screenshot in my previous message. You can see that my cursor is over the item in the PATH but there is no hover text to show she full name of that path element.

I would say that it would be very useful to see the full PATH in a hover action. And ideally be able to copy that full path for easier management.

Can you provide more regarding the search feature? Do you mean full-text search cannot work in pro edition?

The search basically works. I don’t expect full-text search. The issue is how results are being present.

In your screenshot I can only see a list of names, as it is in v12:

  • There is no hover text to show the PATH these files and directories come from. With big archives and especially with duplicates this makes next to impossible to make any sense of the results.
  • There is no place to click on the file items to bring you to the folder instead of going to a screen dedicated to the single file, click the three dots and then go to containing folder. In general for file items, I think it makes sense to the containing folder by default. But at least a separate button to click would be a huge improvement.
  • There is no way to go back to the results. I think it makes even more sense for search to bring you to a dedicated search view, like in a directory. And have a button to go back to the cached search results after clicking on any item. idk, I’m not a UX designer, I just know that I (a very experienced person) feel very much lost using search.

btw I mentioned the drive app for mac, I spoke too soon, today my friend was trying to find some files and it seems app had troubles opening all paths. It was stuck loading. Files in library are 304900. Basically I couldn’t hook him in, he went ack to looking at his old disks which is sad but I’m not sure what else I could do :confused:

I will continue using seafile but presently not for noob users with lots of data.

Seafile support using S3 as storage backend

That’s very different. To me seafile’s vaule is mostly on it being the backend.

Thanks again, just speaking from my subjective perspective.

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I would like to +1 the request to improve core function before seadoc etc.

I started a thread about an issue with SeaDrive but it also ended up pointing out what I feel is a massive flaw in the SeaDrive web UI:

1 Like