Photos: Showing dates/years on timeline scrollbar

[dlauper]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
My photo folder contains 43688 pictures. Going back more than a couple of hundred pictures is not really doable, since it would take a day to go back that far.

Describe the solution you'd like
I propose a real timeline as or next to the scrolling bar. Kind of like Plex but using the full height for spreading out the dates or like Google Photos and probably some others as well,

Cherry on top: if you drag the right-hand side vertical scrollbar to the left, it zooms in allowing for a more precise positioning. Or maybe when clicking it holding ctrl it zooms in to the range of a year.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Album view. Which makes me never ever use the timeline.

Additional context
I'm aware that this could be challenging given the way pictures are loaded step by step. I assume that somehow the total length of the page would need to be known beforhand. The upside is, that this concept could be applied to everything, not just dates, but alphabetical and size sorting too.

This feature request is part of the big picture of my Photos vision discussion at the forum.

[skjnldsv]

Similar: #45

[dlauper]

Similar: #45

Kind of, but #45 doesn't allow you to to go back to February 2008 for instance.

[mattis75]

I value the photo app and would also appreciate a possibility to view and scroll between dates in the slideshow view. This would be great and make the app far more usable. regards. matthias

[Mikescops]

This is a very complex feature given the Dav backend, we would have to pre-process all existing image in the background to create "groups" of photos by date to be able to know how much data we have per day/month/year.

[skjnldsv]

This is a very complex feature given the Dav backend, we would have to pre-process all existing image in the background to create "groups" of photos by date to be able to know how much data we have per day/month/year.

Unless we take just pre-defined ranges. Like for the last year we take every month and then every year
Then if you click we just show the closest :shrug:

[Mikescops]

Could be completely irelevant if we don't have an idea of what the actual data is.

[da-anda]

do frontend applications have to use the DAV backends? Just curious if there is some rule for this (I am new to NC)

[skjnldsv]

do frontend applications have to use the DAV backends? Just curious if there is some rule for this (I am new to NC)

The dav backend is already there, so it's simpler if we all use this.
Otherwise we'd have to implement our own endpoint and that can get complicated. I am afraid we'd end up with too many custom endpoints for apps.

[darrepac]

My report has been flaged as duplicated of this report, so I copy it here:
The new timeline view of latest Beta is very nice and permits to have a similar user experience than Google Photos or others.
Yet there are an issue when scrolling: it takes time to load next photos and it makes it impossible to jump from exemple from now to 5 years ago very quickly as it is possible on google photos and others.
May-be other services are generating a global date index in order to quickly jump at the right place (?)

[Mikescops]

Yes it's the case, they have an index of pictures by range of dates. For Google Photos this comes also with a pre-computed rendering size so that the scroll feels "natural".
Given Nextcloud backend it's not that easy to compete with that.

Considering loading speed, this is related to your machine and the fact that you have or not pre-rendered thumbnails.
I do agree there is work to invest on jumping to old dates in order to speedup the browsing experience.

[JamesBelchamber]

So, for anyone else's reference, this is a good long read on how Google Photos does it's thing (from one of the developers).

I really would like this as a feature so I wanted to knock about some ideas (with a view to possibly contributing, or persuading someone else in my network to 😅). Google Photos is _really_ lovely - but as @Mikescops points out, they have some luxuries Nextcloud does not (or, at least, without added complexity) - as well as all that AdSense revenue 💵.

I wonder if we can approximate this, not with an actual scrollbar but with a calendar (or a meter along a vertical edge that approximates a calendar) - and no attempt to even try and make the meter proportional to the amount of photos on each date. The calendar "length" is calculated with a SEARCH request on getlastmodified - but _ascending_, giving us the oldest photo in the collection. When part of the calendar is clicked on, it refreshes the page with the standard SEARCH request - but for files that were last modified before the selected date. It then allows you to scroll down the timeline as normal.

This solution would have one obvious flaw, which is that you can't scroll up - but honestly, you'd have 90% of what people _actually_ want from this feature (being able to jump to a point in the timeline) without needing any precomputed data.

(Feel free to shoot me down on this one - I might be missing something obvious, I'm just trying to come up with an approximate solution that fits within the limitations of WebDAV)

[andrzej-r]

Having a "scrubbable view" mentioned in the article with a preallocated page size for all the photos would be great. At least users would be able to scroll down roughly to a desired area. I think (I may be wrong) that a scrubbable or a paginated view is also a prerequisite for any kind of a timeline or a calendar widget. It would be awkward to implement them with an infinite-scroll view.

I'm perfectly fine with a square pitch of photo images - all that variable aspect ratio stuff the article spends a lot of time explaining is not very useful in practice and complicates the layout considerably. I'd rather trade this feature for simplicity and speed.

[darrepac]

I'm perfectly fine with a square pitch of photo images - all that variable aspect ratio stuff the article spends a lot of time explaining is not very useful in practice and complicates the layout considerably. I'd rather trade this feature for simplicity and speed.

I do agree