firebase / firebase/firebase-admin-node

FR: Support direct lookup of Storage objects by `metadata.id`

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type: feature request
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TypeScript
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Description

**Title:**
FR: Support direct lookup of Storage objects by `metadata.id`

---

**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
Currently in the Admin SDK there is no way to fetch a file reference directly by its internal `metadata.id`. Users must call `bucket.getFiles()` (optionally with a prefix) and then iterate through every file’s metadata until they find a match. This approach is painfully inefficient for buckets with hundreds or thousands of objects, and leads to high latency and extra egress charges just to resolve a single file by its ID.

---

**Describe the solution you’d like**
Add a first-class API—e.g.

```ts
const file = await bucket.fileById('ABCD1234-xyz');
```

under the Admin SDK’s `Bucket` class (and optionally in the underlying `@google-cloud/storage` client). Internally it could leverage a server-side lookup or index rather than requiring a full listing scan. The returned object should behave identically to `bucket.file(path)` so you can immediately call `getMetadata()`, `download()`, or `getSignedUrl()`.

---

**Describe alternatives you’ve considered**

* **Client-side scan:**

```js
const [files] = await bucket.getFiles();
for (const f of files) {
const [m] = await f.getMetadata();
if (m.id === targetId) return f;
}
```

Works, but requires listing every object + extra round-trips.
* **Storing custom metadata:** You could save your own “id” in `metadata.custom` and index it in Firestore, but that duplicates what the server already knows, and still needs a separate database lookup.

---

**Additional context**

* This feature is especially important for multi-tenant or large-scale apps where buckets routinely hit thousands of files.
* Without it, reverse-lookup patterns become a maintenance burden and performance bottleneck.
* Screenshot of current workaround and templates attached.

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