Photos: Implement album creation

[Mikescops]

As a user I want to be able to create an album from a selection made (see #83) or from a button "Create new album" on the UI.

As a user I should also be able to add more files to a previously created album.

[skjnldsv]

cc @jancborchardt

[jancborchardt]

Yes, this should be possible, however this is probably something a bit further in the future due to us handling photos as files in the filesystem? What do you think @skjnldsv @rullzer @Mikescops?

[Mikescops]

I don't know what kind of storage we have access too, but if we can have a mysql table, should be fine

[dlauper]

In my post on the forum, I showed a possible implementations on this feature. I suggest the following options in the context menu:

• Add selection to existing album
• Create new album from selection
• Create separate albums from folders

The last one is when you have already some folder structure, in my case first level a folder per year, sub folders are then events, vacations, etc. It would be nice to bulk create albums from selected folders.
If it is not wanted to have a folder structure in the Photos app, it could be integrated in the context menu in the Files view.

I think however, this necessitates the implementation of #120 , because it does not make sense when folders and albums are not separated.

[jancborchardt]

What I brought up in "Search by date, multiple tag, location,..... #445" is even more relevant here:

What’s nice in iOS Photos is that they directly create virtual albums for any trip. They group photos by time and location and thus most of the time you don’t need to fiddle with manual album creation. They call it "Memories": https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207023

Of course this might be a bigger thing to look into, but it will also fix a lot of UX problems where currently people have to do manual work of searching and categorization.

[axellebot]

Is it like virtual folder that can also be shared to others ? (like Google Photo albums)

[Mikescops]

Correct yes

[axellebot]

Great. Thinking about photos comment while using virtual folder : What will happen to photo comments ? Merged with file comments ?

[skjnldsv]

Photo comments?

[axellebot]

Photo comments?

Referring to the existing "comments" section (right next to the "activity" section) for files

[skjnldsv]

Ah, you mean the sidebar in general.
No, for virtual albums I don't think the sidebar would be able to contain sharing and the other tabs unfortunately. They all rely deeply on the filesystem.
Comments would be doable as we could register a new entity 'albums' for comments, but that would be quite some heavy work tbh

[inthreedee]

What I brought up in "Search by date, multiple tag, location,..... #445" is even more relevant here:

What’s nice in iOS Photos is that they directly create virtual albums for any trip. They group photos by time and location and thus most of the time you don’t need to fiddle with manual album creation. They call it "Memories": https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207023
Of course this might be a bigger thing to look into, but it will also fix a lot of UX problems where currently people have to do manual work of searching and categorization.

@jancborchardt I really like this idea and I think it should be tracked in a separate issue so it doesn't get lost and the implementation specifics can be discussed further. I'd suggest keeping this issue just about the first step of allowing for the creation and sharing of virtual albums. This alone would be a major upgrade for the photos app, bringing it much closer to parity with other solutions. Once that foundation is built, additional features like automatic album creation for trips can be worked on.

[killua99]

what about use symlinks to create albums ? would be that possible on Nextcloud data object ?

[JasSuri]

Need this so bad.