@music2myear by the way, not every "administrator" of a server is an IT professional... Where did people gather that the network share I want to browse is not the music collection of my brother (from his computer for which I don't have a password), or it's not from a small lab computer where the "administrator" is the side job of a busy student ?

@music2myear even as an administrator, I think this specific question belongs here: the principal condition was not changing the permission on the folder, but having a solution locally. And this condition seems very reasonable to me: as an administrator, would you like to have an user asking you to change the permissions from full access to read only and back every 2 hours? Or would you give me another user account, just to make my life more difficult by logging in and out every time? Actually now I am genuinely curious for solution "from the other side" ...

@fixer1234 thank you also for your previous comment, it was illuminating since I don't use this site very often and I was not aware that "administrator of the server" has become a taboo word

Thank you very much, and I really like your re-wording of the question!