New photo album feature is amazing but

I think there is some important work to do before it can be used with large albums.

I will explain what I consider a common use of albums nowadays.

After your holidays, you have thousands of photos an videos that were taken by multiple devices (diferent family members smartphones, reflex camera, gopro…). Some of these photos are already on your nextclod server because there were synchronized when wifi were available.

Then you decide to create a (collaborative) album.

First of all you want to include the images and videos you already have uploaded, so you look for them in photo view. There are 500, and you have to check one by one to add them to the album (500 checks!!).

Then you want to add your reflex camera and gopro files, so you add them directly from the album dialog. Let’s say there are other 500 photos an videos. These files are uploaded to the default folder /Photos (if exists, if not you cannot upload them and you don’t know why).

Then others users upload photos to the album from their smartphones, and again they are stored in /Photos (all together).

Alternatevely, you can upload these files manually (they will be better organized), but then you need to check other 500+ times to add them to the album.

Finally, it is the issue of the order of images and videos in the album.

Update: after my last tests, it seems the images are sorted by modifed date by default.

As far as I know, they are sorted by creation date. Creation date, not modified date. Creation date, a date that is the date when the file is stored in nextcloud and cannot be changed. Well, as you can guess this kind of sorting does not make sense in this scenario. You have files created when they were synchronized (not necessarily in order), other uploaded manually, other uploaded by other users…

For me (and I think for everyone) the desired order is the date the photos/videos were taken from oldest to newest (to properly play a slideshow). Or the modified date to give the user the chance to fix the order. Even the filename would be an option if the user decide to rename the files by taken date. However, creation date is zero flexible, there is no chance to fix the album order in this situation.

Am I missing something?

I know albums is a new feature with a lot of work behind and probably this issues will be fixed in future releases, but I just wanted to share my user experience and maybe help in some way with this feedback.

Thank you for your comments!

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lengthy discussion regarding sorting happened in this thread:

regarding, adding photos to album, I agree multi select would be better then adding each single file, but in general I would not add more then 100-150 photos to an album (my personal opinion)

Thank you for your comments @wwe ! I agree an album should contain the essential photos of an event, but in my case, I just want to share all holidays photos with family without creating an specific folder where copy the desired photos from the normal backup folder (a virtual folder could do the trick, but albums is what we have for now).

check out memories app https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories
I found photos to be a bit slow & clunky…
(still primarily use photprism as its faster) but so far am liking the memories app

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Thank you @syker69, I already have memories installed, but I cannot create albums to share with it.

Thank you for your constructive comments and (peesonal) suggesrions. A quick question:

Is there a step-by-step guideline on how to setup Nextcloud Memories app to work properly?

Thanks in advance for your reply.
Steve
Namibia

Thank you so much!

Memories solve my needs, I prefer share the folder and apply some right instead of adding all users as collaborators. With Photos app everybody can edit or delete images…

You could generate previews, it works for all images within nextcloud and makes everything really responsive: GitHub - nextcloud/previewgenerator: Nextcloud app to do preview generation in the background.