Nested folders are ignored; shouldn't they be "Albums"?

[Darthagnon]

I also noticed it doesn't seem to pay attention to nested folders? Didn't notice that before... e.g. I have the above wallpapers organised as: /Wallpapers/iPhone Wallpapers/Telegram wallpapers/wall.jpg (where / is Photofield's root).

I kinda expected, when (in Album view) I went into iPhone Wallpapers/ to see the photos in that folder, headed up by another Album called Telegram wallpapers. Instead I saw a flat display of every photo in every folder in iPhone Wallpapers/, mixed with photos that are just there in the folder (which I logically expected only when flattening things to view as a Timeline or Wall).

Expected display:

Album layout:

• Grouping wallpapers by subfolder, i.e. "Album"

Timeline layout:

• Grouping using month/day/time/year, more or less as current "Default"/"Album" layout
• But with <h2> = Year/Month, <h3> = Day/Date, order invisibly by Time?

Wall layout:

• exactly as-is, a flat display of all images, ordered (invisibly) I assume by date and subfolder?

Default layout:

• no idea, deprecate as uninformative and replaced by other layouts? Photofield doesn't (yet) save different layouts per folder as far as I can tell, nor are there enough different layouts to warrant this (maybe if Geo and People tags are implemented, it would be useful)

How it's actually displayed

Album layout:

• <h2> is Day, Month [numerical date], <h3> is Time
• ... Doesn't seem to sort by any definition of "Album"...? Confuzzled.

Timeline layout:

• Full date, time, year grouping... not very useful, more or less a zoomed-out duplicate version of current "Album"

Wall layout:

• It's perfect!

Default:

• ??? Seems to duplicate "Album", and doesn't mean "Default for this folder" (which isn't saved or currently worth saving)

EDIT: Moving this comment to new issue, as it's kinda separate

Originally posted by @Darthagnon in https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield/issues/44#issuecomment-1343450119

[Darthagnon]

e.g. see the way PhotoView does it (from its Readme):

Closely tied to the file system. The website presents the images found on the local filesystem of the server, directories are mapped to albums.

[SmilyOrg]

Thanks for the suggestions! Some of it is bad UX, some of it just an incomplete implementation.

You're right that Album and Timeline are pretty similar. The biggest difference is that Timeline is reverse chronological (like Google Photos) and Album is chronological, meant more for events and trips, where you usually want to start at the beginning (maybe Event might be a better name?)

The Default is just a technical limitation right now, it's not a separate layout and should rather show the "default" layout that was set for the collection in the configuration.yaml.

For example, you can configure a collection that has all your the photos of your phone and set it to show as Timeline by default, and then also configure a collection for a specific vacation trip that shows as Album by default.

If you have all your events (or in the OP case wallpaper categories) as folders in a specific root dir, you can e.g. configure the root dir and then use the explode dirs option to create a collection per folder. It's not nested folders, but it's something 😅

Let me know if you have any other thoughts on it!