Auto uploads UI - empty camera directory not shown, separate media types confusing

[detly]

Just some feedback re. the UI for auto uploads in the beta version (ping @mario). I'm referring to the part of the auto-upload interface that features:

• An icon that can be a picture or a camera
• An outline cloud with a line through it that becomes a filled in blue cloud icon
• A preview of the media in the folder

For the most part this was a pretty intuitive interface for me, but the big "gotcha" was that it only shows up for already-populated directories and it's not obvious that it's only for one media type. So for example

• If you're setting it up on a new phone, it won't show the camera directory at all. It's only after you take a picture or video that you can enable auto-uploads, and then the existing files (that are required to make the UI visible!) won't be part of the auto-uploads. In an ideal world ( 🙄 ) there'd be a permanent setting that's just labelled "Your Camera Media" that always tracks the configured camera directory, even if it changes. There'd also be an option to "prime" the uploads with existing media. Again, I don't know if that's possible given Android permissions.

• This was the most confusing thing for me: at first I had pictures in my camera directory but no videos. In this situation, it's not at all clear that the little "photo" icon only means photos will be synced! Because there's nothing to compare it to! In other places in Android, the same icon can mean all camera media (eg. the gallery icon is usually just a stylised picture in a frame). So I enabled auto-uploads, but then videos didn't upload, and when I went back to the settings I realised what had happened. ...And then I had to sync the existing videos manually.

On the plus side, I really like the automatic sorting by year/month, and the automatic deletion, and I'll just reiterate that I've been using it pretty heavily for the last couple of weeks and I've never had a photo or video fail to upload eventually 👍

Vital stats: Nextcloud version 2.0.0RC2 Android: 7.1.2 OS: LineageOS 14.1 Phone: HTC One M9 (often called "himaul")

Camera storage dir is external SD card.

[mario]

Thanks for the awesome feedback.

• It cannot show a camera directory if empty because we have no way to detect default camera directory (afaik)
• We will eventually have support to upload existing files too, so that might help with the situation

Sorry about the issues, I hope what I said above will help you in the long run? :)

[AndyScherzinger]

@tobiasKaminsky @nextcloud/designers asking for your opinion, everything except for one issue has been resolved by now, so one issue remains:

• display auto upload list entries(image/video) for the standard camera folder in case no photo/video has been taken until this point in time so the folders aren't shown (yet)

The reason for this is that the list entries are based on our processing of the devices media index. So no media = no folder found. This is really tricky to solve since there are two ways to ask Android for the default location(s):

• Legacy/traditional: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Environment#DIRECTORY_DCIM
• New: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Environment#DIRECTORY_PICTURES

The problem is that you can never be sure that the info you get from above is accurate since you don't know which to pick and for DIRECTORY_PICTURES you get the top-level folder not the camera folder (sub-folder created by the camera app).

So My suggestion/vote:

• Close the issue since I can't find a reliable way to predict the camera folder before photos have been taken

because:

• with 3.11 we have the "upload existing images" feature thanks to @ArisuOngaku
• since quite some releases we have the auto detection of new media folders with easy, one-click configuration/activation, so whenever the 1st photo has been taken the Android app will ask you if you want the folder to be added to the auto-upload

Thus we are quite safe not to miss the camera folder but rather support the user in adding it at the time when the first photo/video has been taken.