Smart Albums

[stephanhoennekes]

Some time ago I’ve created a concept for Smart Albums – actually for the NC Photos app. As there have been no reactions to my proposal I think they do not consider it as a relevant feature.

It seems to me that you have the more advanced photo app approach anyway. So, it could be something for Memories maybe. I would appreciate it :)

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Smart Albums allow the user to individually filter photos and save the filter set as an album. These virtual photo albums aren’t static. Whenever a new photo has been uploaded that matches the filter properties, it is added to the album automatically. By setting variable filters such as dynamic time periods, the entire content of an album may also vary in time.

Here’s the detailed concept for Smart Albums:

• High fidelity prototype of Smart Albums on Figma
• Description & definitions of how it could work frontendwise

Screenshots from the prototype:

Smart Albums overview:

Smart Album detail view:

Photos App with expanded smart filter panel:

[MayeulC]

Hey, I read (and upvoted) your initial feature suggestion back then, that sounds like a wonderful feature that I would use. It could also be useful when constructing an album (with the possibility to convert to a static album).

Being able to tag something to add it to an album would be pretty nice already. Imagine displaying an automatically updated (according to chosen criteria) photo album on some digital picture frame.

[pulsejet]

I love the concept, but this is very complicated for obvious reasons. Some of this filtering might be too expensive to do real time so we probably need to do it as part of a cron job to add and remove photos. And then some features like map and color filtering need more work than simple querying.

As such I don't have enough time to work on this right now, but PRs implementing this (or even smaller steps in this direction) are welcome.

[stephanhoennekes]

Thanks for you replies. I agree. The filters are indeed very complex to implement. I fully understand if you do not have the time. But I thought at least to leave this here as inspiration could be worth it. And as you mentioned, one could of course take just some easy features to implement it as some kind of MVP.

[tomchiverton]

Both Memories and Photos appear to be missing even basic "(content type) with (date type) from (start) to (end)" type filtering, is that right ?

So that'd be a necessary first step, right ?

I don't see what that'd be an expensive search to run, requiring the complexity of a background task, as the appropriate meta data is already extracted ?

[ChildLearningClub]

@stephanhoennekes I commented on your other proposal for photos, but thought I would say it again here. I think the UI is top notch, really looks good! I can also tell that you put a lot of work in building out your demo and it shows. I really hope that it can be utilized.