photoprism
photoprism copied to clipboard
photoprism
UX: Timeline View
I think a timeline view or a timeline scrollbar, like in Google Photos or Synology Moment, would be a cool feature to have.
I personally don't find the timeline scrollbar in Google Photos helpful in practice. We thought more about a punch card view and automatic clustering by date & location.
Can you post some screenshots of Synology Moment?
I think Synology Moment tried to imtate Apple Photos moments function. Essentially it uses the combination of time and location to group photos into "moments", instead of time only as in a timeline.
Moments sound cool! But considering the current self hosting market, there's not many services supporting a timeline feature. One of the main reasons is that I want it to easily scroll through pictures sorted by date. I have been looking for over 2 weeks and can't seem to find something useful except for maybe plex and the currently abandoned ownphotos project. Else I would survive with a standard gallery/year/month folder structure, like many others.
I am more than happy to donate to this feature specifically, if it hasn't been considered added to the project. I do think it will cover a big gap in the projects out there.
@dennorske I guess it will take a few donations to really pay a developer to do this, but we listen to community feedback and have this on our list once the basics are done :)
If we do a "pro" version with additional features, our sponsors will certainly get a free license!
Could it be similar to what Nextcloud maps have? There's an app in the store called maps, and it allows you to save locations, as well as visualise GPS tagged photos. It scans through and shows up like this:
The nice thing is, when you zoom out, the pictures groups up. If they are taken in a small area, and you click the icon with a number under, it spreads out all the thumbnails around and you can have a glimpse at them:
Reason I am showing it, is because it looks very fluent and nice. Will this be similar to what is wanted above? There is also a time-period slider on the bottom where you can define from-to dates, and the map will show only the relevant pictures.
@dennorske Thank you very much for the screenshots! We spent the last couple of days (Merry Christmas!) preparing our database for efficient clustering (country/year/month) and location search using S2 cell IDs (more efficient than lat/long). See also https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/154#issuecomment-569500842.
Next, we need to provide our own location service to actually be able to index many photos in acceptable time. When this is done, we can finally focus on the UI, certainly room for improvement. One of our ideas is to show a path on the map where you've been and then you can travel along.
Here's some more inspiration for the UI. It is taken from plex. I think it's nice how photos are separated by day and dynamically tiled based on the image size. The scrollbar on the right is overlayed by the years and the smaller ticks indicate a high density of photos there. Overall it's nice to scroll through memories like this.
Google Photos is similar, personally never found this very useful or pleasing to my eye TBH. Lots of space wasted when you only have one or two photos per day.
If not a timeline, it could be a scrollbar that shows month + year close to it when you scroll? Some sort of seeking like that is very handy, at least if you're an ancient google photos user like me :) It is extremely handy to do. But I would not say this is the most important feature, it is more a nice-to-have if #154 (2nd part of Comment) is implemented.
Maybe I can't properly use it because my mouse is too fast 😄
Let's focus on the essentials to get a stable release, there will be enough time to experiment afterwards.
Clustering by year, month and country is easy with our current database schema. We'll do sharing next as this has higher impact on our architecture. Worked a lot on events and validation recently for a smooth user experience.
That is great, thank you for all the efforts in the project! I am excited to see the sharing come along, that is clearly something I am missing. Good luck
If we do a "pro" version with additional features, our sponsors will certainly get a free license!
@lastzero I'm off-topic, but I've seen a lot of mentions of a possible Pro version. Are there any plans on how it will be licensed? E.g. a free-as-a-beer but proprietary license is not something I'd potentially want
Fact is, we want to be as free and open as possible and think this provides real value to our users, like when you look at how we develop together with our community.
On the other hand, we've been working full-time for about ~2,5 years now and there are still a lot of requests waiting to be implemented. GitHub sponsors doesn't even cover the monthly costs of our servers. So the idea is to release a special version with additional features for our sponsors, contributors and eventually paying customers. See "Funding" in our docs. Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to take this and sell it on your own. Suggestions welcome.
Fact is, we want to be as free and open as possible and think this provides real value to our users, like when you look at how we develop together with our community.
On the other hand, we've been working full-time for about ~2,5 years now and there are still a lot of requests waiting to be implemented. GitHub sponsors doesn't even cover the monthly costs of our servers. So the idea is to release a special version with additional features for our sponsors, contributors and eventually paying customers. See "Funding" in our docs. Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to take this and sell it on your own. Suggestions welcome.
@lastzero Of course selling/getting funding for free software is a difficult issue. I've checked the Funding page and the first thing I see is "This project is about freedom and privacy but not necessarily about free beer.". So, it has to be free software, or else there won't be much of a difference with other proprietary projects.
According to the funding page, there won't be Enterprise customers (as opposed to Nextcloud for example). So the project should be funded by regular users, which value privacy so they won't accept the proprietary solution. And by "Regular users" I mean not a super tech-savvy users (it's not a big market), but real regular people. And the most important thing for regular people is convenience.
Make the source code available for both versions with the same license, but do not distribute a "Pro" version for free. This is how e.g. OpenProject works - both versions are GPL'ed. So yes, it should be possible to obtain the source code for the "Pro" version without paying, but it shouldn't make sense because it won't be convenient. And the most important thing for regular people is convenience. So if a user obtained the source code for the "Pro" version - he must build everything from source, he won't have upgrades and will have a generally semi-working setup in a long term. For example - iOS user can't have this app even if he has a source code, unless he has an up-to-date Mac, general knowledge on how to install apps to and iPhone and he must have a developer account (which won't solve all of the problems). This is very inconvenient and it's better and easier to buy an app, even if it's GPL'ed. This is my opinion :) And it's just one example - servers can be more convenient, too.
And, actually, getting back to the topic, from my experience, regular people, when they say they need a "Cloud", mainly mean photos, and they certainly mean Timeline. This view is the default view in Apple+Google photos, and it is mainly used because people (including me) don't have much time to organize their photos, they don't want to add photos to albums unless it was an event, something significant, like a trip. And they don't want to filter photos by year, month, etc. they don't want to think. The Timeline interface, though seems simple, lets people look for their photos in a convenient way, with the ability to go to a specific date and grouping by date is letting them find events quickly without organizing anything
Of course selling/getting funding for free software is a difficult issue.
Shouldn't be difficult. I'm part of the free software community since the 90s and it was clear from early on, that free doesn't mean free beer. I see it as an additional feature that provides value to our users. Unlike back in the 90s, software as a service is very popular today, so the GPL only provides limited protection to us and other startups that invest a lot of time and money into their products.
It's not clear to me why the right to commercially distribute every line of code we release should be important to private end-users.
If there were more sponsors, we could release everything under a MIT or BSD style license. As a matter of fact, we only have very few sponsors and no other funding whatsoever. So we need to find a different solution unless you want us to stop working on this.
And, actually, getting back to the topic, from my experience, regular people, when they say they need a "Cloud", mainly mean photos, and they certainly mean Timeline. This view is the default view in Apple+Google photos, and it is mainly used because people (including me) don't have much time to organize their photos, they don't want to add photos to albums unless it was an event, something significant, like a trip. And they don't want to filter photos by year, month, etc. they don't want to think. The Timeline interface, though seems simple, lets people look for their photos in a convenient way, with the ability to go to a specific date and grouping by date is letting them find events quickly without organizing anything
For now, you have the new Calendar view plus the year and month search filter in our main view. You can also sort by date (added, newest first, oldest first), relevance, similarity and file name. Plus we automatically create moments based on country and year for you. It feels like this is enough for a first release and of course we're using your feedback to continuously improve our product.
@mpodshivalin Pro doesn't mean you won't be able to get or modify the source code. Take a look at how GitLab handles dual-licensing, they also distribute the code.
Everyone can use our software under the terms of the AGPL from now on: https://twitter.com/browseyourlife/status/1272449177100918786
This is far from being proprietary. Those who need additional rights or advanced features like multi-user support MAY pay for it at some point in the future. We pay for development and take all the risk. Let us know if you get a better deal somewhere :)
I'll put this issue on my todo, let's see what we can come up with (besides what is already implemented to browse by year and month)!
Won't be able to start this or next week though, as we're busy with developing link sharing, testing and writing documentation for our release.
Currently getting everything stable for our release so not adding new features until that is done :)
Cool! I’d be happy to pair on stability bugs. It would help me to get to know the code base and solve issues on my own. I’m on Hawaii time. A bug I’m facing is crashing when importing from an rclone Mount in GCP. If that’s on the list happy to help.
And, actually, getting back to the topic, from my experience, regular people, when they say they need a "Cloud", mainly mean photos, and they certainly mean Timeline. This view is the default view in Apple+Google photos, and it is mainly used because people (including me) don't have much time to organize their photos, they don't want to add photos to albums unless it was an event, something significant, like a trip. And they don't want to filter photos by year, month, etc. they don't want to think. The Timeline interface, though seems simple, lets people look for their photos in a convenient way, with the ability to go to a specific date and grouping by date is letting them find events quickly without organizing anything
I'm completely, me and my friends and colleagues take sometimes dozens of pictures a day. The location's not as important as the timeline - psychologically, for I remember a day or weekend as a whole, and not necessarily the place or place names, and really appreciate the simplicity of Google Photos timelines.
For those of us who have loads of photos, scrolling by month and year is key, but fluidly without knowing the exact day or month, as we look through the thumbnails, we know when we're getting warm and then we find what we were looking for hopefully.
I also often have to find an image of a document or an event, but it may not have location data (or I can't remember where I took it).
I also tend to find a vertical timeline slider (as shown in the plex screenshots above) more efficient than the current calendar implementation. Say you're browsing your photos and want to skip to a specific month and day. Consider the following two processes:
Timeline view:
- Hover your mouse over the timeline until you find the day you're looking for.
- Click to jump to that day. You're done and right where you want to be.
Current calendar implementation:
- Click on calendar mode.
- Click on the month you want to go to.
- Scroll down and down and down and down and down until you find the day you're looking for.
The more photos you have in a given month, the more scrolling you have to do to get to a specific day. Very large libraries require a lot of scrolling.
If a timeline view gets added to the main library screen, I think it would also fit perfectly within the current calendar mode, allowing us to quickly jump to specific days from that mode as well.
@conrad82 has funded $20.00 to this issue.
- Submit pull request via IssueHunt to receive this reward.
- Want to contribute? Chip in to this issue via IssueHunt.
- Checkout the IssueHunt Issue Explorer to see more funded issues.
- Need help from developers? Add your repository on IssueHunt to raise funds.
![issuehunt-oss[bot] avatar](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/29881?v=4 "Published by a pub.dev verified publisher"){kind=small}
I'm brand new to PhotoPrism but it's pretty great so far! I've been looking for a solution to have the default screen a lot like google photos. aka newest photos at the top. Most of the time when i go to my photo app/site i'm looking for something recent. as of right now, the default view is someone puzzling. It looks like when some photos got imported their date stamps got changed to to some time in February (it's middle of march now).
Anyway, one more plug for a timeline style default view!
Any updates on this issue? I'd love to see a Google photos like timeline feature.
@JulianEggers We have still have some other big tasks with higher priority. See: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/projects/5
