Essentially looking for a shared drive that family members or friends can upload files to without having to make individual users / accounts Anyone know a good way to do this (self hosted or another service if Foss / private)
Another solution might be setting up Syncthing on all your computers. It would present as a folder on the local systems and anything put in there would be synced to the other systems. No logins required.
Upside: Easy as pie and can be used by anyone who has used Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/whatever
Downside: everyone gets a copy of every file regardless. Good luck getting rid of old files. Could be fine, though.
Have you checked out NextCloud?
I wouldnt do it without a login even on a LAN
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/files/file_drop.html
Might be what you’re looking for?
I just use an FTP to share files. It’s pretty easy to use and it’s very powerful.
FTP requires a installing a thick client, is an old, insecure, complicated protocol, doesn’t play well with firewalls… FTP must die! https://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie. At least use SFTP (not FTPS) which is built-in to SSH servers and much simpler to setup. But then good luck explaining normal users how to configure a client (WinSCP is decent but sill requires some configuration) unless they are running Linux (most file managers support SFTP in a simplified way).
An alternative is Samba/SMB (multiplatform file sharing protocol Linux/OSX/Windows) - configuring it is a bit involved, but definitely doable. Client setup/file manager integration is OK.
But I would rather use Nextcloud for this, a simple web interface is probably more intuitive for non-technical users. And you get other features such as comments, tags… if that’s your thing. Can also be accessed from desktop file managers using WebDAV.
SMB would probably have the best performance of the three, though. Depends on the number and size of files being shared.
Interesting point. I’m looking at some alternatives, I didn’t even realize just how insecure it was.
filestash (https://www.filestash.app/) can be an option , you can use any back end you want
Nextcloud is a nice centralized system for that, you can setup shared folders that appear as a weblink that anyone can upload to, but it would require someone (likely you) to set up and maintain a LAMP stack application.
Otherwise if you want a simpler “share files between PCs” kind of application then Syncthing would be great for that. Install it on both PCs, link them, then setup a shared folder. The contents of that folder are then mirrored between the pcs.
