Chapter 2 of 6 · 2 min
How do I view files in S3 without downloading them?
Choose Open instead of Download. A PDF, a photo or a video then appears in a new tab, and only the part you look at leaves the building, which is also why it costs cents rather than dollars.
The lesson 4 film is on chapter 1.
What a browser shows on its own
- PDFs, photos (including phone HEIC photos in a good workspace), plain text, HTML.
- Most audio and video, played a slice at a time, so a two-hour recording starts within a second.
When a file insists on downloading
The usual culprit is Content-Disposition, a label on the file telling the browser to save it. Files uploaded by a program often carry the wrong label. Fix the label, or use a link that overrides it, and the file opens in the tab. The next answer shows how.
The exception
Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Browsers cannot draw them, so viewing one in place needs a conversion step: Office on a computer, or a document server. A file workspace runs that server for you.
- $0.09per GB
- what a full download of a 2 GB video costs: about 18 cents, every time someone opens it
- under 1 cent
- a preview that reads only the first minutes
Prices are for US East, October 2026. How to preview files in Amazon S3 without downloading them has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 3 OF 6Can a PDF open in the browser?Two labels on the file decide it.See the steps to open, share and give a colleague access in the AWS Console and in BucketDesk, side by side.