How to Make a File Public on Amazon S3 Storage

In these days of online cloud storage, it certainly makes sense to use these storage services for backing up your precious files so that in case of disaster or data loss, you can just download the files from the cloud. We should give importance to our digital life as the data is not replaceable and once lost, its lost forever. If you are using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and want to share files to public, then here is how it can be done. Making a file public means sharing that file with your friends and family. The process is very simple and easy, as you may have never thought.

If you have never heard about Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as Amazon S3 then this is an online storage facility. Its scalable, reliable, secured and backed by the ecommerce giant Amazon. The user only needs to pay for what they use.

Before you start following this tutorial, we assume that you have signed up for an account on Amazon S3. If you already have an account on Amazon, then you can directly login using those credentials and if you don’t have an account, then you can also create one.

How to Make Amazon S3 File Publicly Available

1. Login to AWS Management Console.
2. Select the Bucket from the left side that contains the file that you want to share with others. If you have not created any Bucket, then you can click on Create Bucket to create one. Bucket is a term that Amazon uses for root folders and inside these buckets you can place various files and folders.



3. From the Bucket, right-click the file that you want to share and click on Make Public.



4. You’ll get a prompt that says “Are you sure that you want to make (filename) public?”. Click on OK.
5. Next, you can see a new transfer window in the bottom of the screen. Wait for the status to change to “Done”.



6. With the above step completed, we have successfully made the file as public. To get the public download link for Amazon S3, you can right-click the file and click on Properties. In the Details section, this is your public link.

To do this task, you don’t need to use any application or extension available for Amazon S3. Why use any third party application when the online interface is easy to use and gets the job done.

If you want to try a program to manage your S3 account, then you can try using CloudBerry Explorer which is a freeware app for Windows users.