Hi all,
Sorry that many of you experienced some issues and regressions with the Photos app. Let me first say: we really wanted to avoid regressions, this was explicitly discussed on our last meeting where we decided to move forward with Photos. It was meant to be an upgrade for 95% of the users. So as far as it isnāt, we intend to fix that!
Let me address our current understanding of the 3 major issues people face with the Photos app that are regressions from Gallery (of course thereās a lot more we can improve, and we already did, but those are new features!).
As a TL;DR: most of this should be fixed in 18.0.2.
Performance.
So there are two things to know about the performance of Gallery and Photos.
Gallery used to be designed to look into all folders on your Nextcloud and only show the folders with images. This was a very slow process, explaining why the app was so slow. A major motivation for Photos was to improve performance, which we did in party by the left sidebar showing āmy photosā primarily. That can show āyour imagesā (those not shared with you) pretty much immediately. And that covers many use cases, of course.
But not all, so āshared albumsā was added to show what is shared with you. And, last but not least, you can see images on external storage (showing of which takes quite some work) when you use the Your Albums view.
Now at least one person (who started this thread) noted that the performance is MUCH slower than the previous Gallery app when in the Your Albums viewā¦ That really shouldnāt be the case: the new Your Albums code that shows all images in folders (External storage or not) should be much more efficient. So John tries find out whatās happening. It could be related to the preview generation which can cause a storm of preview-generation-threads on the server, causing a slowdown. I recommend everyone to use the preview generator app!
TL;DR: performance should always be better than Gallery, we havenāt found a regression yet.
Folder structure not shown
Now the second issue about folder structure.
So if you have a structure like this (from a comment by adi2k5):
/root_folder
|_Photos
|_2010
| |_Album1
| | |_SomeOtherFolderBelow_Album1
| |...
| |_AlbumN
|_2011
| |_Album1
| |...
| |_AlbumN
| ...
|_2020
|_Album1
|...
|_AlbumN
Our current Photos app flattens it to this, removing the year info:
/root_foder
|_Photos
| |_Album1
| |_Album2
| |...
| |_AlbumN
|_Folder_with_icons1
|_Folder_with_icons2
| ...
|_Folder_N
We just made a mistake there, and consider this a bug which will be fixed! A pull request is already here.
TL;DR: fix coming soon.
Public link view
The public link view has two changes.
First, and this was so rare most users probably didnāt know, but the Gallery app had a specific share link view: you could share a link that would show the Gallery app view, not the file view. We would like to bring this back, but it is technically hard and while less nice, the grid view of files is quite OK too, so it is lower priority than the second issue.
That second issue is: if you click a photo on a public link, you used to get the slideshow preview! Today, it just downloads the image. This slideshow was provided by the Gallery app and, yes, we basically forgot about it. It seems that even during the testing phases in Beta and RC, this was not noticed by anyone so it came out only now - and weāre working on fixing it.
When
Now Iāve said weāll fix everything so you might wonder when. Well, actually most of these are not that hard and already work-in-progress. We hope theyāll be done in time for the upcoming 18.0.2, which is scheduled for March 12 - so thatās in 2 weeks! The viewer is a bit harder, it might take a bit longer, weāre not 100% sure yet - but we are working on it (and as always, help is welcome).
A note I want to add about the discussion itself. As I said, our goal was never to take away features. Yes, there are some regressions and those are due to mistakes - we are human, too. Most people who asked about it or discussed this have been very polite, and thank you for that! Sadly, some were not, and that is not very motivating at all. Please, keep in mind that weāre talking online (where negative emotions tend to get amplified) and also, please assume we want the same thing: make Nextcloud better. With that in mind, you would assume that we made a mistake, not intentionally made your life worseā¦ And that leads to better, more motivating and ultimately more productive conversations!
Iād also like to point out that youāre not just talking to people who get paid to work on Nextcloud (not like thatās an excuse) but also to the hundreds of amazing community volunteers who make Nextcloud awesome, like Corentin who recently wrote a great blog about his experiences contributing to Nextcloud. Consider participating in such a positive way: you can join our conference or other events or help code online and make Nextcloud better,
Thanks for reading!