Stories: Not all media files are exported

[IdealChain]

Signal has implemented a story feature some time ago. Exporting the pictures and videos of a story only "half-works": some are exported, some are not.

The reason is that within the database, Signal Desktop represents every single attachment that belongs to a story as a separate message. Now, if there is a story published with multiple media files, all these messages have the sent-timestamp within the same second, get assigned the same filename and all but the first file are skipped for export. I guess the problem is the assumption that not more than one media message is sent from a contact per second.

There are some options, but they have to be considered carefully:

• Change the file naming scheme
  • this could break backward compatibility for deduplication
  • could also fix the somewhat rare edge case that multiple normal media messages are sent per second
• Identify messages belonging to a single story and export them with increasing numbers
  • can they be reliably identified and do they have a reproduceable order?
  • this would be similar to how multiple attachments in a normal message are handled