New 7.25.0 'All Media' Feature Seemingly Doesn't work

[AniAggarwal]

Using a supported version?

• [X] I have searched searched open and closed issues for duplicates.
• [X] I am using Signal-Desktop as provided by the Signal team, not a 3rd-party package.

Overall summary

The New "All Media" button on Signal Desktop 7.25.0-1 stable doesn't show all media. For some chats, it is only the last week's worth of images. For others, it has a few images from varying months but still does not have all images.

Scrolling up to load images that aren't in the All Media view, and even clicking on and viewing them, is not sufficient to make them appear in the All Media section.

Confirmed that the "All Media" feature works successfully/as expected on these same chats on Signal for Android 7.16.4.

Worth noting that my desktop was synced to Android device, if this is a sync issue.

Desktop on Arch Linux 6.6.52-1-lts using official package. Attached debug log was run immediately after:

1. Restart of signal
2. Open chat
3. Open All Media
4. Close All Media
5. Open debuglog

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to any chat on Signal Desktop
2. Click meatball menu -> All media
3. Compare shown media to expected set of media on synced chat on Signal for Android. Desktop is missing most images (99%+ for chats with lots of images).

Expected result

Should have all media in the all media section.

Actual result

Missing most of the images. Seemingly random collection of images that appear. The ones that do appear, however, are tagged with the correct dates.

Screenshots

Omitted for privacy.

Signal version

7.25.0-1

Operating system

Linux 64 Bit

Version of Signal on your phone

7.16.4

Link to debug log

https://debuglogs.org/desktop/7.25.0/b84c25fa21b395d6e65356b298fa1c651fbb7dff8f3d97d3409253bee202d486.gz

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@AniAggarwal Can you take a look at one of the missing attachments in detail? If you scroll back to that message in Android, does Desktop have that message?

If it's missing in Desktop, can you talk about the history of this Desktop instance? Has it ever been unlinked, needing to be relinked to your primary device? That's a way that you can end up with chunks of missing messages - between the last time that Desktop was connected to the Signal servers, and when it was next linked.

If it's present in Desktop, what can you tell us about that message? Is it newer, older, a group or 1:1 message, how many attachments does it have, what device was it sent by, etc.?

[briankung]

This also doesn't work for me on macOS. It shows a limited selection going back to last month. The key detail here, I think, is that my monitor is large enough to accommodate all of the media that pulls on first load. If I make the window shorter vertically so that a scroll bar appears and then scroll down, it begins to load more media.

Out of 5 or so conversations that I've tested, this only happens on one of them.

[AniAggarwal]

I'm not seeing that behavior with monitor/window size on my system.

These messages that contain images that do not show up on the all media page do show up on the desktop app. I am able to click on the images and videos and watch/view them just fine.

However, I have just found, that it seems that the longer I leave the app open, the more messages it 'discovers'. It seems that that the app is just searching the DB and compiling all the media. It seems to be a purely time based thing - without any scrolling, more images keep progressively showing up. Furthermore, I'm not sure that scrolling to find an image that is not present on the desktop all media and clicking on it is sufficient to guarantee that it will show in the all media page. However, the act of scrolling seems to speed up the media discover, but I can't be sure.

With that said, after about 10 minutes of leaving the app open, it seems that all the media has successfully been discovered, for the chat that was left open. This must be repeated with each chat.

Last detail - there is a discrepancy in where the show up in the all media on Android and desktop, since Android client seems to have a bug where it is showing under the wrong date. E.G. it is showing photos that are tagged as Aug 27th when clicking on them under the "This Month" category, while desktop correctly places them under "August 2024".

All messages are present 1:1, never needed to relink to my phone/primary device. This occurs with group chats with 4 other people, 1 on Samsung Android (S23), 2 on iOS (newish, <3 generations old), 1 on Grapheneos on (newish) Pixel hardware. Also occurs in individual chats with each of the above, and any other devices, including old iPhones. Occurs on images and videos. I don't have enough other documents sent to be able to give a definitive answer if it occurs with PDFs, for example.

Worth noting that I only launch Signal on my desktop about once a day. I do not run it minimized to tray. So, each launch of the day, it takes about 5 minutes to start up while syncing the last 24hr's messages.

Perhaps leaving signal running in the background would eliminate the effect of searching through all the history to find media as a workaround for some users. Personally would prefer if some caching was available as I'm not a fan of background processes.

Thanks for the quick response and help!

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@briankung We've got a fix for the large monitor scenario coming soon!

@AniAggarwal I think I understand what's happening for you - as messages are changed (like, their attachments are downloaded lazily after you start up with many messages to catch up on), they are put into media gallery even if they aren't in the target time range. Does that match with the behavior you see? For a conversation with messages that you have downloaded already, messages that have been around for a long time, do those all show up in the All Media view?