Monica: attach images to activities

[Nebucatnetzer]

I'm not sure if this is maybe beyond the scope of Monica
but I had the idea that one might want to attach a picture
to a activity.

[jeremydenoun]

@djaiss I think more generally we should implement an album feature
some ideas (not limited) :

• tagging, link to object (activity or others) and searching feature
• face-detection with classification from an image set
• import from iPhoto / Google Photos / ... #217
• exif reader

This can permit to build user-friendly wall in dashboard and extend Monica to cloud personal photo storage software #266 (but I agree I don't think we should go on public sharing or others social features it's a lot of work)

What do you think ?

[Nebucatnetzer]

Your idea would be an option, however what I had in mind was more something to help you remember.
For example you would add an activity like "Went hiking with Max" and then you can attach a picture of the view. Something to support your brain.

A full blown album seems to me a bit overkill for Monica.

[jeremydenoun]

In your idea how you imagine review all this picture ?

• if you imagine in activities list this will take a lot of place (maybe in future we can imagine auto archive them after a while)
• if we must enter in activities details for viewing no chance to use it (too long)

for me your idea is good but with an automatic album creation with "thumbs" à la facebook and when you have in profile a part with albums you can easily add a creation feature and upload feature, I don't think it's overkill because for my side if it was available I probably use it.

[Nebucatnetzer]

I didn't thought to use the pictures on their own.
They would be part of the activities details. Similar to a picture in a news article.
Why would that be too long?

[lhansford]

It'd be cool to be able to add images as part of notes as well. My specific desired use case the other day was wanting to attach picture of my friend's business card.

[djaiss]

@jeremydenoun while I truly appreciate the discussion, I think making Monica a cloud personal photo storage software is really way out of scope. The strength of Monica will be to do one thing, and one thing only (organizing interactions with contacts) extremely well. A personal photo storage software is not the way to achieve this, and would just lead to a bloated product in my opinion.

That being said I understand the need to attach pictures to certain type of objects.

[jeremydenoun]

I understand and agree your position (monica shouldn't became a personal photo storage), but if we target a good user experience and great product adoption we should consider open all media/informations storage to converge and centralize all users efforts, I don't like (I imagine like everybody) fill data multiple time in different place.

In my opinion we have two way to imagine it :

1) allow file upload in generally on each entity

we can imagine small but efficient way to manage it :

• Create a global "files" 1-N relation table with (object_type (based on table name by example), object_id, local_path, name, type, size, createt_at, updated_at)
• Add on each entity form a multi-uploader component
• Add on profile view a tab with all type == "image", updated_at desc and a direct link to entity form

This can be enough for start and maybe not too long to implement

2) API interaction

In your roadmap a first milestone is API opening, we can imagine allow "unstructured" data storage for each entity this can permit us to save raw data (by example with file link URL) and we can imagine web plugin extension on UI (I don't know if you plan it but with laravel this can be easy) or conditional feature for read this "unstructured" data and format it. This can be great for save "interesting links about contact", store third party data (maybe autogenerated) or simply add specific field for querying

Do you think follow one of this option (maybe both)?

[djaiss]

Both options could work. The first one would require to think long and hard about the design. The current design is super messy and not great in my opinion, and if we don't think carefully about images, we'll mess up the UI even more.

That being said, based on the user feedback that I've received and that I keep receiving, this is not a priority at the moment. We'll get there for sure, but not on the short term. Moreover, allowing file upload everywhere would have a great impact on the disk space requirement - yet another thing to think about.

[jeremydenoun]

Ok thanks for the feedback (it's good to know) it's seem second option can be more easier especially when you will work on APIs, last thing keep only "urls" (or unstructured text) permit to ignore file storage requirement

keep us in touch ;)

[scheidm]

@djaiss regarding Monica not being a personal photo storage software I agree. But if the goal is just a quick mnemonic cue, one wouldn't need to store very high quality photos, and one could skip the album entirely. Either 1 photo per activity, or a small carousel ( max 3, 5?) and hard limit the size to like 1280px on a side.

Add an icon to the activities timeline with a view on hover, and the image directly beside the date and category on the activities details page.

What do people think?

[djaiss]

Thanks to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/pull/2132, this feature will be possible soon™.