WebDAV/cloud support

[flexagoon]

It would be great to have support for WebDAV in Aves to be able to connect it directly to cloud photo services like Google Drive, Nextcloud, etc., without the need to download the photos from there to your phone first. There are several libraries for WebDAV on pub.dev, but they arent popular, although, looking at their code, it seems like the protocol isn't very hard to implement.

[flexagoon]

It may be better to add direct authorization for the most popular cloud platforms (like Google Drive, iCloud, MEGA, Yandex Drive), but WebDAV is still needed in order to connect Nextcloud and some less popular cloud platforms that aren't worth adding separate authentication for

[deckerst]

I doubt you use all of these services. What do you actually use and need?

In general, rather than feature requests with a large scope, it's more helpful for me to start thinking about features from concrete use cases, actual needs.

[flexagoon]

I personally use Nextcloud

[axac]

@flexagoon it will be a good features !

[citizenserious]

Nextcloud would be awesome (:

[nebton525]

Agree on that

[deckerst]

What kind of features are expected when "connecting to a cloud service"?

1. listing media files
2. listing albums
3. search by name
4. indexing metadata (tags, countries, ratings, etc.)
5. map, stats, search by metadata
6. editing/uploading media files
7. sync with local files
8. more?

Just to be clear, I won't work on this in the foreseeable future, but I can plan better if I know how people use these services.

[nebton525]

To me the most important thing would be listing media files and indexing metadata

[deckerst]

@ItsBen12000 thanks for the feedback. Listing media files is probably trivial, but indexing metadata raises some questions.

I believe that indexing metadata would require downloading the images on the device for analysis (as the cloud services are unlikely to provide them via their API), but OP especially pointed out without the need to download the photos from there to your phone first. Do apps that support cloud services extract metadata without downloading the images first?

By the way, if you can recommend other apps that do what you need, that would be most enlightening.

[nebton525]

@deckerst Ig you're right with the metadata support. Here's a Nextcloud Gallery app https://gitlab.com/nkming2/nc-photos . It has metadata support but takes a lot of time to download it so it's kind of useless.

[flexagoon]

@deckerst there's an app called Les Pas which is a Nextcloud Photos client. If you dont have a Nextcloud then you can create an account on some public provider and check how it works in Les Pas. It's also opensource so you can check how it works

[citizenserious]

I would be happy if the app could show the gallery of my nextcloud. That means listing media files and listing albums would be great. Thanks a lot for considering this feature in the future (:

[ilkersigirci]

I hope we get this feature in the near future :). I would be an awesome extension for this app.

[bushvin]

Yeah would be awesome!

[STPKITT]

I'd like to see Aves support open protocols for anything regardings network/cloud access. So that would mean accessing shares offered via SMB, WebDAV and maybe NFS and possibly as the next step Nextcloud and/or other similar open source cloud solutions. IMO Google, Apple etc. should deal themselves with their proprietary crap and if the open source solutions turn out being superior the better it is :-)

[marcosilva85]

+1 for this. It is so important to view our Cloud galleries as nowadays for some folks like me is where we keep 90% of our library. Also would mean more reasons to open Aves more often.

I have a different suggestion to offer on how to bring this issue to success though: The rclone project is the de-facto tool for connecting to many cloud providers and there is in Android the RCX app which is FOSS. Only issue is that the "mounting" of a remote cloud folder into Android's SAF is not enabled.

So, my suggestion would be that instead of Aves trying to reimplement the integrations to cloud again, just try to work on solving it through RCX, which then would complement Aves (and other gallery apps)

Newhinton is trying to solve it here at RCX fork: https://github.com/newhinton/extRact

Might be worth to take a look and contact him

[deckerst]

Thanks for the interest and suggestions.

I don't think remote images and local images should be processed the same way (for example, parsing metadata requires reading the files, but I doubt people would be happy if Aves automatically downloaded their whole remote library). So having some system to make it transparent is not always appropriate. Different cloud systems may also provide different levels of media-related features. Maybe some already provide endpoints to get thumbnails, or metadata...

Anyway, I also think cloud support would be nice, but I'll get to it when I get to it.

[kha84]

When I had to exit all the commercial photo cloud storages I was using, I started to think about self-hosted replacement. Nextcloud sounded about right, but I hadn't played with it yet. So far I just happy to have an android app doing "kind of" rsync over sftp via tor (as my sshd is behind the NAT + cgNAT). I configured the sync in a way so it does two-way-sync of all photos across my phone and pc within last two years. It means I can delete some really old photos from phone, just for the sake of freeing up some space there, without making these deletes to be propagated to my home pc. And in the same time I do have a luxury of editing some fresh shots from both mobile or home pc and those edits will be synced to the otger side.

I think if I ever want to have a full access to all of my photos stored at home from my mobile, I'll probably spin up something like Photoprism, Piwigo, Lychee, Immich, Stingle, Librephotos or anything which is dedicated only to photos and will be working with tags properly.

I do agree, it would be nice to have this kind of feature within Aves, but implementing it properly might be a headache. Eventually imho it will have to mimic Google Photos or Apple Photos (mobile apps), e.g. to fetch thumbnails and metadata for all your photos stored in cloud + fetching full-sized images when user clicks on one of those thumbnails to see bigger version. And later on, to housekeep those downloads.

[dAtA-TRoN]

WebDav support would be sooo cool. I would love to see that ♥️!

[2br-2b]

I'd love to see this feature!

As of right now, photos from external apps (like Nextcloud) are showing up in the album when the Nextcloud app is installed; however, since not all my photos are stored locally, many are showing up blank:

They are, however, sorted properly into months (though I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that this is based on file metadata and not photo metadata)?

[TheSunCat]

A good gallery app is painfully missing for Nextcloud users. Having it integrated with an already awesome local library, with the official Nextcloud app which syncs photos & videos from my phone automatically would be great!

[DavidMndz]

What kind of features are expected when "connecting to a cloud service"?

1. listing media files
2. listing albums
3. search by name
4. indexing metadata (tags, countries, ratings, etc.)
5. map, stats, search by metadata
6. editing/uploading media files
7. sync with local files
8. more?

Just to be clear, I won't work on this in the foreseeable future, but I can plan better if I know how people use these services.

From my point of view, and althoug have access to the metadata would be awesome, I think that listing the media files and the albums is more than enough.

As other users say, Nextcloud is missing an app to see the photos properly, so Aves might fill that gap just by listing the images.

[xmha97]

Please also support pCloud. Thanks.

[LukasMandok]

I would like to give my ideal usecase for a cloud integration:

• nextcloud (I don't need anything else)

• select new albums if they should be synced to nextcloud (set a default folder for new albums on nextcloud)

• If deleting Fotos /album, ask If changes should be synced to nextcloud (or use a default setting instewd) and the other way around. If the album is deleted on remote, if would be nice if Aves would break the sync and ask, if the album should be detes as well.

• viewing remote pictures would be nice as well, but I don't need that feature as much

With these features Aves would be perfect for sorting photos on your device and save them to nextcloud. Whenever I didn't need the pictures anymore, I would just delete that album and break the sync. And periodically I would rearrange the albums in nextcloud and break the sync that way.

[davidfrickert]

I'd like to add myself to the list of people that would love to be able to access Nextcloud media from Aves!

This app is amazing and the only shortcoming is needing to have all the photos on-device which becomes a bit hard over many years.

[Simx72]

I would like the Nextcloud syncing because I don't have much space in my phone. I started using Nextcloud to upload photos automatically but the only problem is that I cannot see the photos anymore in Aves. I have already tried other apps but I would really like this feature so it's all in one app and because I am very used to the interface and like it a lot.

[Antlersandsunbeams]

I haven't been able to find a hosting solution other than Google that's cheaper for high resolution, raw format photos in bulk. It's frankly a terrible delivery platform, but it is ubiquitous, and very cheap. I just need to be able to pull and organize them to my device. I'll do what I can assisting, if you ever decide to do anything in this direction.

[TeMPOraL]

Voting up. I had to stop using Aves when I turned on OneDrive sync of the gallery on my Samsung Galaxy phone. As much as I love Aves, having a terabyte of cloud space, that doesn't reencode and compress my media like Google does, is very useful to me. The automatic offload of photos to the cloud doesn't play well with Aves.

What I'd like to see is more-less what the Samsung Gallery and OneDrive apps provide: ability to preview media (including properties) without downloading, and download on demand. Offloading decisions can stay with OneDrive/Samsung Gallery, I'd just like Aves to be able to access to it transparently.