attach images to activities

Nebucatnetzer commented 7 years ago

I'm not sure if this is maybe beyond the scope of Monica but I had the idea that one might want to attach a picture to a activity.

jeremydenoun commented 7 years ago

@djaiss I think more generally we should implement an album feature some ideas (not limited) :

tagging, link to object (activity or others) and searching feature
face-detection with classification from an image set
import from iPhoto / Google Photos / ... #217
exif reader

This can permit to build user-friendly wall in dashboard and extend Monica to cloud personal photo storage software #266 (but I agree I don't think we should go on public sharing or others social features it's a lot of work)

What do you think ?

Nebucatnetzer commented 7 years ago

Your idea would be an option, however what I had in mind was more something to help you remember. For example you would add an activity like "Went hiking with Max" and then you can attach a picture of the view. Something to support your brain.

A full blown album seems to me a bit overkill for Monica.

jeremydenoun commented 7 years ago

In your idea how you imagine review all this picture ?

if you imagine in activities list this will take a lot of place (maybe in future we can imagine auto archive them after a while)
if we must enter in activities details for viewing no chance to use it (too long)

for me your idea is good but with an automatic album creation with "thumbs" à la facebook and when you have in profile a part with albums you can easily add a creation feature and upload feature, I don't think it's overkill because for my side if it was available I probably use it.

Nebucatnetzer commented 7 years ago

I didn't thought to use the pictures on their own. They would be part of the activities details. Similar to a picture in a news article. Why would that be too long?

lhansford commented 7 years ago

It'd be cool to be able to add images as part of notes as well. My specific desired use case the other day was wanting to attach picture of my friend's business card.

djaiss commented 7 years ago

@jeremydenoun while I truly appreciate the discussion, I think making Monica a cloud personal photo storage software is really way out of scope. The strength of Monica will be to do one thing, and one thing only (organizing interactions with contacts) extremely well. A personal photo storage software is not the way to achieve this, and would just lead to a bloated product in my opinion.

That being said I understand the need to attach pictures to certain type of objects.

jeremydenoun commented 7 years ago

I understand and agree your position (monica shouldn't became a personal photo storage), but if we target a good user experience and great product adoption we should consider open all media/informations storage to converge and centralize all users efforts, I don't like (I imagine like everybody) fill data multiple time in different place.

In my opinion we have two way to imagine it :

1) allow file upload in generally on each entity

we can imagine small but efficient way to manage it :

Create a global "files" 1-N relation table with (object_type (based on table name by example), object_id, local_path, name, type, size, createt_at, updated_at)
Add on each entity form a multi-uploader component
Add on profile view a tab with all type == "image", updated_at desc and a direct link to entity form

This can be enough for start and maybe not too long to implement

2) API interaction

In your roadmap a first milestone is API opening, we can imagine allow "unstructured" data storage for each entity this can permit us to save raw data (by example with file link URL) and we can imagine web plugin extension on UI (I don't know if you plan it but with laravel this can be easy) or conditional feature for read this "unstructured" data and format it. This can be great for save "interesting links about contact", store third party data (maybe autogenerated) or simply add specific field for querying

Do you think follow one of this option (maybe both)?

djaiss commented 7 years ago

Both options could work. The first one would require to think long and hard about the design. The current design is super messy and not great in my opinion, and if we don't think carefully about images, we'll mess up the UI even more.

That being said, based on the user feedback that I've received and that I keep receiving, this is not a priority at the moment. We'll get there for sure, but not on the short term. Moreover, allowing file upload everywhere would have a great impact on the disk space requirement - yet another thing to think about.

jeremydenoun commented 7 years ago

Ok thanks for the feedback (it's good to know) it's seem second option can be more easier especially when you will work on APIs, last thing keep only "urls" (or unstructured text) permit to ignore file storage requirement

keep us in touch ;)

scheidm commented 6 years ago

@djaiss regarding Monica not being a personal photo storage software I agree. But if the goal is just a quick mnemonic cue, one wouldn't need to store very high quality photos, and one could skip the album entirely. Either 1 photo per activity, or a small carousel ( max 3, 5?) and hard limit the size to like 1280px on a side.

Add an icon to the activities timeline with a view on hover, and the image directly beside the date and category on the activities details page.

What do people think?

djaiss commented 5 years ago

Thanks to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/pull/2132, this feature will be possible soon™.

nhymxu commented 3 years ago

Today, I want this feature and found this issue. Bump to top.

monicahq / monica

attach images to activities #301