Integrate GCam Folders into Camera album

[HeyItsJono]

Hey there, for those of use who use Google Camera, when features like Burst Shot or Portrait Mode are used, GCam creates a subfolder within the /DCIM/Camera folder which contains each burst shot grouping (or, in portrait mode, the pair of portrait/non-portrait shots). These subfolders have the naming scheme "IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmm". As seen below, these folders can quickly accumulate if you use these features regularly:

The issue is, Camera Roll has a tendency to detect each folder as a separate album, rapidly clogging up a user's gallery with albums, especially if that user is using the parallax style. This is even more of a problem if the Camera album is pinned, as every one of these subfolders then automatically becomes pinned, meaning they never migrate to the bottom of the list. This can be seen here:

The Google Photos app handles this by treating each of those subfolders as a single image, and when you view that image, you can navigate between burst-shots or turn on/off portrait mode. I was hoping Camera Roll might be able to implement a similar feature, however that is a lot of work to support a single app, so I was hoping you might at least consider making Camera Roll recognise all subfolders of /DCIM/Camera matching that naming convention simply display their contents as part of the Camera album rather than as separate albums themselves.

On a slightly related note, this also brings to light the issue that subfolders act as pins if their parent folder is pinned, and in the case of DCIM, if you pin Camera, every folder in DCIM acts pinned, even though they're subfolders of DCIM rather than /DCIM/Camera. An option to not pin subfolders if a parent folder is pinned would be super appreciated!

Thanks for all the time/effort you put into making this amazing app :)

[Seferi]

Hi mate, there is a tool called gcam tool in the play store which organizes the folders created by gcam or deletes them or moves the desired photos to desired folders. I'm using it and it works very well with camera roll. Here is the link to gcam tool: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apptuners.gcamtool

[kollerlukas]

@HeyItsJono What about just creating a Virtual Album, "Camera"? And add the DCIM/Camera directory to it. That should create a single album containing all images that can be found in all the subdiretories of DCIM/Camera.

[bakennedy]

It's nice to have a workaround, but when I installed the app and saw this behavior for the first time, I just assumed it was a problem with camera roll. With the photo list filled with "albums" that don't belong there, the UI is such a bad first impression that I almost uninstalled to move on. After coming here, I will use this workaround, but you're probably losing most of your new users to the poor first impression this creates.

I'm happy to help with a PR to address this, but I'm totally new to your code ☹️

Do you have any initial work on this or guidance on where to start?