MerginMaps
Defer the download of photos to a background task
This is something that came to my mind while working to support a citizen science project/survey that is being done using MM. This project involves many "surveyors" but they get access to the MM project not all the same time, at the beginning, but rather along time. So who joins at a later time has to download a version of the project that has already hundred/thousands of photos for possibly up to a few GB of them.
In this scenario downloading the project can take a while. Maybe it could be worth of having the MM App download first the project file and datasources, then download the rest in the background, much like as WhatsApp does when we restore an account on a new phone (chats are restored first, media is downloaded in the background).
On the server side I'm really not sure if download requests are added to a queue or satisfied in parallel as they come, but for the described scenario it could be worth to use a queue, so to not overload the server and the network.
Olá @gioman, thank you for sharing your idea to improve our system! We’re soon introducing a feature that enables online photo previews (https://github.com/MerginMaps/mobile/pull/3711). Combined with media-sync setup (https://merginmaps.com/docs/dev/media-sync/), this makes your suggestion technically feasible. We’ll also take your approach into consideration and keep you informed about future updates.
@VitorVieiraZ Olá Vitor, thanks for the feedback. The preview via http would be very useful indeed, but I think that there are use cases where having access to the photo files is important, i.e. someone that needs to go update the status of an (already surveyed) asset in a very remote place, where there is no connection. I agree that maybe is not a very common use case. Anyway my initial suggestion ia really about not having users to way many minutes before being able to use the project and also not having a lot of heavy download requests flood the server. Again, pretty much some corner case.