Alternative method to view chat media details

[wladimirleite]

This was requested by several users here...

When analysing WhatsApp chats (or any chats), once an important media is found, the user wants to get more details about it, like the file name and hash. So the initial request was to add the media's file name and hash to the chat preview. That wouldn't be a good solution, as the chat preview would be bloated, and sometimes there are more than one linked file (same hash, but different paths/file names).

I suggested using the checkbox, maybe together with the existing "References" tab, but there are a few issues. When there are many media files in a chat, it is not easy to find the ones that were checked. That could be overcome, but the other issue is that once you click on an item of the references tab (to view its details), you lose the point you are in the chat, which may be long, and that is inconvenient. What I do myself is just check all important media in the chat, and once I finish, I filter checked items and then pick details, add them to bookmarks etc. But that is also not very straightforward when there are many checked items, especially audios, which are not easy to identify/memorize as images/videos/PDFs.

So I came up with an alternative approach that would help in this case and hopefully others (like P2P reports). Close to the checkbox, there would be a new "button", that would show all items associated with that particular media in a new panel, together with their basic metadata and preview. It would be an "auxiliary view".

The premise would be to have a simple user interface, minimal changes in existing code and keep current features (i.e. do not replace or change existing panels/features).

I implemented a minimal working version (changing only WhatsApp chats) and have been using it for analysing a couple of real cases, and it has been useful so far.

@lfcnassif, what are your thoughts? Do you see other ways of achieving the requested goal with the existing features?

In a second step, I plan to add a way (through context menu) to add items from the secondary tables (like this new one, references and referenced by) to bookmark (and possibly remove from bookmarks).

The metadata and preview were added to single panel (together with list of items), so they would always be together, to avoid confusion with the "main" selected/displayed item.

A screenshot: