[Suggestion] Select multiple photos and videos across different albums and download the selection as .zip file

[wechsler42]

Hi there, I would like to suggest an enhancement for selecting and downloading photos and videos. At the moment I can either select and download one photo/video or a complete album with all its media files. I would like to suggest the enhancement that I could select several photos/videos across different albums and download my selection as a zip file.

[wechsler42]

Hello Patrik, with the upcoming Christmas time where all the photo calendars were prepared I just thought on getting back to this feature suggestion. It would be nice and speed up the process when one could select photos across several albums and download them as a zip package. However, thanks again for offering PiGallery2!

[bpatrik]

Hi, thank you for the nice suggestions. This is a more complex feature request. That is not on my roadmap for the next few years. I'm happy to collaborate on a design doc for this feature. Can you take the lead on it? I'm also happy to review PR.

[wechsler42]

Hi Patrik,

I try to make a user story for this.

As a PiGallery2 user, I want an easy way to select multiple photos and video clips across all my albums and download the selected items as a zip archive. This process would incorporate at least:

• While hovering over a photo or video thumbnail, display a checkbox or a circular area on the top left corner where a user can select or deselect the particular assets
• Display a counter on the top menu bar:
  • "n items selected" if >=1 photo or video clip is selected
  • display a "X" on the right side of the counter for "deselect all"
  • display an icon for "Download all n items" on the right side of the "X"
• After pressing "download all n items"
  • a .zip archive is downloaded with this naming convention: pigallery2_ archive_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.zip
  • the .zip archive contains the selected assets with their original file names
  • after finishing the download all n items are deselected

Some questions I could imagine to think about::

• What is a suitable archive size?
• What happens when the suitable archive size is exceeded?

[Tofee]

I second this request: this year again, my family wants to download a selection of photos from the album I shared with them. Unable to do so, they just download the whole album (hundreds of photos with sub-folders) and deleted the unwanted ones afterwards...

@wechsler42 it doesn't look like there is any "suitable archive size" concept when downloading a whole album: it either just works, or doesn't. So I don't think we should bother with that in a first implementation.

Your way of handling the selection looks rather nice; however the selection from multiple folders might make things quite complex: maybe, as a first step, we could consider downloading a selection of photos from a single folder ?

[bpatrik]

The way that would bring us closer to this feature, I think should start with consolidating the backend code for folder listing and searching. (making folder listing as a special case of search). That would allow a lot of things. One of them would be downloading search results. Downloading search results already a step forward into downloading partial folders.

As I expressed multiple place in Readme and https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2/discussions/738, I'm not implementing feature requests.

My current goal is to enable some reasonable extension #743 and let users extend the app the way they prefer.