Apps-android-commons: Overhaul media details view pane

Created on 7 Sep 2017  路  6Comments  路  Source: commons-app/apps-android-commons

The current media details view pane feels rather clunky, and would be difficult to implement new features such as #161 . I'm not sure exactly what sort of redesign I have in mind yet (perhaps someone with a better design eye or familiarity with other photography apps can chime in?), but preferably it should be able to pave the way for #161 .

explore gallery media details

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Featured pictures are meant to be enjoyed as much as the screen allows, and currently the media details activity is indeed far from optimal:
2015-07-27_20-51-30_macroglossum-stellatarum https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/2015-07-27_20-51-30_Macroglossum-stellatarum.jpg -> screenshot_20180515-203907

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A couple of things I notice about the media details view - firstly, that we don't respect the portrait / landscape nature of the image. For example, this picture was taken landscape.

Looks good when my phone is in landscape

device-2017-09-10-120103

As I rotate my phone the details view does nothing to imply the original orientation, it just truncates the picture. Since this is the _normal_ orientation for a phone, we truncate by default:

device-2017-09-10-120131

Google Photos does the right thing - it shrinks to fit and letterboxes the image - making it clear what the original orientation was.

Secondly, since we host the details view in a fragment, as part of the ContributionsActivity it shares the same header ("My Recent Uploads") as the main list view. I think we should address this. We have an opportunity to delight users with a _shared element transition_ as we move from list view to details and back.

There are 3 operations available on the detail view right now and it sounds like we're talking about adding a 4th

  • Share
  • Download
  • View in Browser
  • Edit (coming soon?)

Google Photos also offers 4 actions on a bottom navigation (share, edit, info, delete), and a bunch of others in an overflow menu. The detailed picture information is on its own full-screen view. The bottom navigation definitely cleans things up.

Google Photos does have a nice feature where an image tagged with a location will show a map view on the (full-screen) image info screen.

Thinking about navigation, the details screen is in a subsection of the navigation hierarchy and ought to show the <- "up" navigation arrow button not the hamburger (nav-drawer) button.

Crazy idea - since the main image list already shows the title, why not expand the list item in-place to a card view with other details? A RecyclerView using a staggered grid layout could handle that with ease. https://material.io/guidelines/components/cards.html#

I was playing with the main Wikipedia app today - particularly around how it handles photos:

wikipedia-app

The details are minimal (as you would expect - the focus isnt on pictures) but it does highlight the idea of letterboxing photos in landscape mode. They also do a nice job of presenting content in card views on the main screen too. I like how they did their bottom navigation view on the main screen too.

New bug logged - #894 (Media details lost on device rotation)

If we are overhauling the media details screen we might want to fix the bug, or at least make sure we dont cause a regression and re-introduce it.

Featured pictures are meant to be enjoyed as much as the screen allows, and currently the media details activity is indeed far from optimal:
2015-07-27_20-51-30_macroglossum-stellatarum https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/2015-07-27_20-51-30_Macroglossum-stellatarum.jpg -> screenshot_20180515-203907

I think this can be considered solved, even category edition seems to have found its place.

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