Merged view of photos (on device vs uploaded to Photonix)

[damianmoore]

Gaming4LifeDE on Reddit suggested the mobile apps should show photos that are just on the device.

The reasoning is that a user could be certain they can delete photos from their device to free up space, knowing that it is in Photonix.

Google Photos has something similar so we should see what UI cues they use.

[skutter-de]

So I just checked what the interface for Google Photos looks like. You have a cloud with an up arrow for the upload button, which makes a lot of sense to me but it doesn't show you at all when it's uploaded. The icon just disappears. I'd rather have a cloud with a tick in the middle to symbolize that it's uploaded. And for changing the view I'd use a switch/toggle button on the top bar "include photos on server", but then the thumbnail of the photos on the server should have a little cloud icon on the bottom.

I'm typing this up on my phone right now and I'm not really good with sketching UI, maybe someone can make a sketch to see if this is a viable solution?

EDIT: I think in the overflow menu you could have an option which deletes photos from the phone you already uploaded to the server.

[damianmoore]

Thanks for this @Gaming4LifeDE. I think I agree, it should be obvious that it's synced with an icon like that. If you have time to do a sketch that would be very cool.

I can see there are three states for a photo (but I'm not sure if the third one needs an icon):

1. Only on Photonix (if it was uploaded from another device)
2. On both phone and Photonix (was synchronised)
3. Only on phone (not yet synchronised)

Just thinking through though so don't let me stop you planning more.

[skutter-de]

Hey, so I made some sketches. Forgive my bad artistic skills :D I made an imgur album with descriptions: Link

We can discuss more details if you're interested.

Sidenote: I noticed my system bar at the top being dark. It should be white. I don't know why it's not.

[damianmoore]

Thanks for this @Gaming4LifeDE. Lots of ideas and some UI stuff that I think would be good to do sooner rather than later.

• Settings dots icon - :+1: I will change to this
• Filter icon - :thinking: seems obvious for user to find but not sure where it stands regarding the existing filters (tags, colours, objects, etc.) and whether I need to move these too. I'm hesitant to have two different filter groups.
• Tabs at bottom - :thinking: I had been thinking about moving the tabs to the bottom myself actually but was mainly wondering if it makes sense on desktop or whether it's more intuitive at the top (and wastes less space)
• Thumbnail overlays - :+1: Looks pretty neat and the star rating saves a lot of space
• Photo detail screen - :+1: I like it and it fits well with a download feature that recently got merged for downloads here: https://github.com/photonixapp/photonix/issues/259

I try and make the simpler UI changes soon and then I think we need to get the basic app uploading ticket https://github.com/photonixapp/photonix/issues/229 done before this. Let me know if you have any responses to my thinking points. Thanks

[skutter-de]

Maybe we should get together on Google meet or something similar (maybe have it open to everyone), I got a few things which we could discuss (mainly settings, themes and so on)

[nomandera]

Relevant From https://github.com/photonixapp/photonix/issues/151

...Related to this is caching. DSUB is in my opinion the gold standard of app caching model. It has an elegant design whereby in online mode you see your complete library. You can tick anything to be permanently cached so it works offline. Beyond this you set cache limits locally and it will dynmically use this to maintain as many of the common assets it can tranparently i.e. if you consume 10 things and you have space it will cache these locally FIFO.

The real magic though is offline mode. In this mode you have the exact same user experience but rather than using online + cache it uses cache only.