"All Photos" view improvements - stacking

Feature Requests
#1

Dear Mylio team,
I would like to add on the need for stacking/grouping photos.
There are more often than not cases when you do want to preserve similar photos in your library. Just to give couple of use cases:

  1. Taking photos of kids - you obviously make many shots and only take best of them but it would typically be much more than a single shot from the same place
  2. Day of hiking - there are easily sets of similar photos which you do want to preserve - like same mountain ridge in a panorama, in a regular resolution, with you in foreground and without you etc
    and more

After importing photos into Mylio you have those options to view them all:

  1. “All Photos” tab - this shows all the photos, without any information about events those photos belong to. It’s a “too raw” view - when you want to just look through your library this is not the view to work with
  2. “Calendar” tab - you at maximum (in month view) could see one photo per day. And when there are no photos for some day - and most days a year do not have photos - there are black holes in the view. So for this is not the view to choose for just looking through your whole library

What I suggest is to have following capabilities (I did see similar suggestion by another user and posted reply there as well - sorry):

  1. In any view (All photos / Calendar view of specific day / Folder view / Album view) to be able to choose any number of photos (better not mandatory sequential) and make “stack” out of them.
  2. For stacked photos need to be able to choose “Stack Cover”. When not chosen, 1-st photo from stack is considered to be a cover
  3. Visually stack could be open - all photos of it are shown with some visual clue regarding belongness to stack - or closed when stack cover photo is shown along with visual clue representing the fact there is a stack under the photo
  4. Event automatically represents stack unless said otherwise (same as folder has an option to automatically represent an event). When even is created - whether manually or automatically out of the folder - you can choose the cover photo
  5. I would very much like if stacks could be nested. I.e. some event (i.e. "Day of hiking ") is a top-level stack while groups photos which represent individual scenes (“this lake”, “that mountain” etc) make nested stack
  6. Would be nice to have an option to choose whether given stack is by default collapsed or expanded with the default being “collapsed”. To be able to define stack as “open by default” would be super-useful for nested events, i.e. when there is “vacation 2021” event spanning multiple days and then every day is a nested event. In such case “vacation 2021” being an event would automatically be considered a stack but I would set it to be “expanded by default”

That way the “All Photos” view would become much more usable !!!

2 Likes
#2

Hi @Nick_Shrayer - thank you for the thoughtful suggestion. I love that you’re looking to bring events to more views like All Photos and stacking photos is a very intriguing way to do that.

I’m interested to learn more about how you use Folder view right now. It sounds like most of what you want to accomplish could actually be accomplished with Folders. Is it possible to utilize Folders in this way with your setup?

#3

Hi @Mylio_Matt. Thanks for your response
I’m using folders for physical organization of my photos and folders hierarchy looks like this (–> folder represent folder entries while just individual photos)

Year 2018 → folder
… 01-Jan → folder
…[2018-01-10] Hiking Tour X → folder
… (many photos)
…[2018-01-14] Birthday of Y → folder
… (many photos)
…[2018-01-19] Skiing vacation → folder
… [2018-01-19] Day 1 → folder
…(many photos)
… [2018-01-20] Day 2 → folder
… (many photos)
… [2018-01-21] Day 3 → folder
… (many photos)
…(many photos taken in January 2018 which are not part of any event - just occasional ones)
02-Feb
…
12-Dec
Year 2019
…
Year 2020
…

So indeed every folder deeper than those representing months actually maps to event. But how does this help to view all the photos on single timeline so I can collapse events and see them along with occasional photos?

1 Like
#4

Hi Nick!

Thank you for the additional information. I was trying to look holistically at your setup and see if folders could be used in a way that closely mirrors what you’re looking to do. In some ways it looks like it does, but we fall short by:

  1. Not allowing a mix of folders and loose images to be viewed at once
  2. Limiting your view to whatever folder you’re in, meaning that you’d rather have an ongoing list of photos (like All Photos) but with folders/event/stacks intermingled.

Out of curiosity, if we had a way to show folders alongside loose images would this accomplish what you’re asking? You would then enter the 01-Jan folder and see your folders in addition to images, all in line. The thing we wouldn’t offer here would be a way to do this for your entire library since opening the 2018 folder would really only show the 12 month folders (and any loose media for the year), not any of the media associated with those months.

Thanks for talking it through!

#5

Hey @Mylio_Matt
What you suggest could be kind of workaround. The main issue this workaround does not address though is to take a plane list of photos - not organized as folders - and by default (when stack is collapsed) to only show some of them. For instance photos which belong to single day - say my kids playing in the park. I have 12 photos like this (for one single day) which are already result of filtering out duplicate and unnecessary ones. But what I would like to do is on the timeline to only have 2 of them and to hide others under collapsed stack (because other 10 are pretty much similar, may be with different face expressions and I don’t want to loose them by deleting but I equally don’t want to “pollute” a timeline with photos looking similar)

Thanks for trying to understand my intentions :slight_smile: