Signal-desktop: Show Links / Images / Videos Previews In Conversations

[rongi]

I think this is a very important thing for a lot of people. Being able to see images directly in the chat view is so much more engaging and convenient.

[gasi-signal]

@rongi Thanks for your feature request. This would be a nice improvement but we’d have to design it properly to not have any negative privacy impact (linking to an image just to see when someone read your message, etc.)

[fourier]

Yep this would be awesome as it helps to drive people away from fb messenger etc, as people often post links to images/photos/dropbox links

[gasi-signal]

To get a better sense of the effort to do this in a privacy preserving manner, check out our integration with Giphy: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/

[rongi]

Thank you for the great work, guys. Chances are you discussed this before, but why you decided that adding an option to not preload images (turned on by default) is not a good temporary solution? This will allow people to control themselves the level of privacy they want.

I’m asking partly because I want to contribute to the discussion and partly because of curiosity.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@rongi The short answer is that we have a very high bar for adding new options, since they add complexity to the product. We prefer comprehensive solutions which result in a simple user experience.