Really Microsoft? This is the best you can do with FTP servers in Windows? [View all]

Background:

When I went into the consulting business 15 years ago I registered a domain with a hosting company and purchased server space. The main purpose was to get my own email server. I chose Inmotionhosting. They have been fine. One of the things I get with my package is unlimited storage. I have pretty much retired now so I do not need anything but the email server any longer. I know I could swithc everything to Gmail and probably pay a small fee to Google but I have not been motivated to do that.

FTP Servier:

My Inmotion account includes FTP, Wordpress and a bunch of other things I do not use. I have used FTP a few times. I set up a subdomain with a weather page based on my Davis weather station and CumulusMX running on a Raspberry Pi. CumulusMX has a very good forum with people there who know Linux very well who will help. I used WinSCP and FTP to upload the weather page files to my server space. You can check it out: My Weather Page

I decided it might not be a bad idea to use my server space for an offsite backup for the several computers I have, especially my photo collection and business files. I wanted to be able to add the server space as a mapped drive or network location in Windows Explorer. I had done that before to share a 2 TB SSD attached to my Raspberry Pi running Samba. That's when I first began to really hate Windows. I could not get the shared resource to work. I could ping the RP but could not open the SSD folders. It turned out to be an obscure setting in group privileges that I had to change. Windows would work with Windows server but not a Linux server the way it was set in Windows 11.

I set up a network location for my FTP site. Windows even gives you the format when you tell it you want to set up an FTP server. The format is "FTP://mydomain.com". That worked after I figured out the Inmotion instructions forgot to tell you the server address has an ftp. in front of it.

I proceeded to upload a fairly large folder of photos using Windows Explorer and it worked very well. The trouble started when I decided to open some of the photos after the upload completed. When I clicked on any file Windows tried to open it up in MS Edge browser. Edge cannot do FTP so it just shows the startup page. I checked the file properties and Explorer recognized it was a .jpg file. I figured this must be an issue with the Default Apps setting. I made sure that .jpg files opened with the Photos app. I tired again and it still tried to use the useless MS Edge to open the file.

I went back to the default app settings and looked at the setting for FTP protocol. The only choices are MS Edge or my FTP software WinSCP. If I choose WinSCP all I can do when I click on a file is download it. Then I can navigate to the download folder and open it with Photos. What a PITA. Why can't Windows just open a file that it knows is a .jpg in Photos?

I decided to see how Linux handles FTP servers. I have an older PC that runs Linux Mint. As I guessed Linux Mint opened the server and let me save my user name and password. I made it a Favorite. I clicked on one of the photos and it opened right up. I tried other files and they opened in the default app too.

The lesson once again is that Windows works with Windows resources (maybe) but if you want to go outside of Windows you are on your own. I am sure there is some registry tweak or something I have missed but that's for another day. Maybe there is a way I can set up a server on my Inmotion server using something other than FTP that Windows works better with? If someone has experience in these things I am all ears.