Discussion Thread - Changes to mobile app layout and flows #12597
Replies: 38 comments 67 replies
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I'm honestly a big fan of these changes, I like the consistent UI/UX, and I think this will fit well into the Immich app. Love to see the app developing more, much love and keep up the good work! |
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I am missing the 'group by' function in albums |
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I was thinking about it. Then, settle on not having it on the mobile app since it works well on larger screens. On a smaller screen, the easiest way to get to the target album is by searching for the album name using fuzzy search |
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Won't the app suffer from loading the full list of albums? As this is what happens (happened) right now as well. Having a large number of albums, then grouping prevents the app from the need to load this list. |
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I think you are talking about two different things in the same context
The app will have to sync the complete list of albums regardless so it can work offline. |
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But what would be the problem of having maybe an option to toggle the 'group' by function on and off. For example in my case, I have a few albums with the same names but in are grouped in different years . But if I would now add the year to the album name it will be again annoying in the web ui. I think it would just be a great addition to make the album exprience more consistant. |
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Primary case for my user base (family with 600+ albums) is being able to search albums {self and shared} simultaneously. |
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Yeah, the fuzzy search takes into account your use case |
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This, plus the ability for all users to add tags to both self and shared albums. |
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Will "On this device" show all device folders, like gphotos? It'd be neat to still be able to view the device images even of folders aren't backed up. Would be quite nice if it allowed individual photo backup then :). |
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Yes, it will be |
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Great! This is something I've been missing for a while. Follow-up question: Will there be functionality to add individual photos/videos from those local directories to the immich database? (like g-photos does?). Every once in a while I simply want to sync a particular photo from a local directory to my photos stored on immich, but without syncing the entire directory. Follow-up to the follow-up: on a similar note, regarding the ability to upload photos from other sources than the sync'd directories, g-photos allows users to sync individual photos to their library directly from other apps. An example of this workflow: I am having a WhatsApp conversation with a friend. Friend send me a photo. I open the photo and click the share button, then select g-photos as the target application. G-photos now uploads that photo to my library. |
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along these lines.. would it be possible to make Immich a destination via the (Android) Share feature? Edit: looks like @IrrerPolterer and I had the same idea at almost exactly the same moment.. 😄 |
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I started some work on this https://github.com/immich-app/immich/tree/share-to-immich-1 |
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I believe there is a similar feature request. Let's not using this thread as feature request thread 😅 |
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I'd personally prefer not to have the Collections tab and keep it as it is with Search to the left of Library, similar to older versions of that other app. My main reasoning for this is because:
The only real way I'd accept the new Collections tab is if it was on the far right where Library is and with the promise of no further major UI changes (not including new features, etc obviously). |
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Maybe allowing the user to customise the order of the navigation bar sections other than the default, also allowing to enable/disable them would be a good idea? |
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I was thinking the same and it would be fine as a future improvement after the initial change. All the options (favorites, people, map, etc.) could be options to put in the bottom bar in the preferred order. Or a simpler approach could be fix timeline to slot 1 and collections to slot 4 and let the user define slots 2 & 3. |
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My point is that if all there is, is a search bar, it won't be something people tap on as often as, for example, the album tab, so putting the album tab before the search tab seems like a better move from a UX perspective. |
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That depends, personally I use search way more than albums because I have yet to group most of my pictures into albums. I could be in the minority, but I don't believe we have any data to definitely say which tab is more frequently used. |
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I agree with putting all the collections functionality under Search. This is how other major mobile photo apps define search (any/all criteria) and what people are used to. Collections to me sounds like something I am manually compiling, rather than search/filtering criteria, which is what you are displaying there. |
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Any plan to add utilities to mobile app? |
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Like the similarity deduplication tool? |
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Yes that's what I'm thinking of. It's the only thing in utilities right now I believe |
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+1 for being able to work on duplicates (and future utilities) from mobile! |
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+1 on this too. This would really help since deleting files in immich app in iOS can also delete duplicates on device. |
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@spupuz We have a feature request for this, and your request has also been heard many times. We gave a reason why it is not being worked on yet and when the feature is expected to be available. I will hide your comment as it doesn't fit the thread's context. We will take more severe action if this keeps repeating. |
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I am looking foward for this nice new features. Thank you! |
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Are there any plans to add a forbidden-fruit style search function? It could make searching and filtering much faster as you can do everything from a keyboard instead of menus. The collections page could be merged with the search (similar to how it is on the current app version) while albums could be its own page. The search could also search for albums too which could allow the user to filter for file types in a specific album. |
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A rough draft of the search page 
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And an EXTREMELY rough draft of what search suggestions could look like 😅 
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Yes, adding “filter tags” like the forbidden-fruit app does it would be fantastic. Especially with People, there are a ton of use cases:
Maybe even adding simple logic (like pictures of June 2024 that are not screenshots), but that might be too complex. |
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yup, as of right now the app can do most of that but it can be clunky to use as you have to navigate through the filter menus, simply typing and selecting would make filtering much faster. |
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I like this much better than having a separate collections tab. Nicely done! |
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A tiny critique: I’d like to see the word “Immich” be removed in favor of just the logo which would open space for the search bar to be at the top (where I find most search bars). This would open more space in the bottom bar for a (user customizable?) set of icons. That’s really all I have at the moment; everything looks like a logical evolution of the UI. |
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That's an interesting idea, I know lots of app don't actually have text anymore, just relying on icon recognition. |
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I think this could be a really nice idea - as you say, it makes search resident at the top, and frees up more vertical space for looking at photos/timelines/collections by shrinking the "header". And, again as you say, it would remove the need for a search button on the bottom toolbar, so it could be replaced with a user customisable button. So the first three buttons are fixed, and the fourth button could be user customisable to wherever users find themselves most frequently (people, locations, tags, folders, etc.) |
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The text wouldn't have to be always removed right? I imagine a smaller search bar that expands into the place of the text when clicked could work too. |
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A pattern I've seen on other apps is to have the search icon on top...
and when pressed the entire top bar becomes the search.
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Yes, I like that expanding search bar very much. Not sure how much dev energy that would require, but I love it. |
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Could I suggest some changes to the UI in the 'Photos' tab. I pulled this of a feature reqest: #12022 (comment) Inspirations from the forbidden-fruit. I think this makes the most use of the screen real estate. The bottom area where we select (All photos/Day/month/year) AND the top area where it shows the date range -> All are just overlaid on top of the images, which is awesome in the sense that it does not allocate an entire area for that information. 
The (All photos/Day/month/year) might not be totally necessary, but I really like the way the dates are overlaid over the images. It still uses that area of the screen for images. And immich does the following -> the dates are taking up way too much real estate. Overlaying them on the images would look so much better. 
And once you scroll to a day that has a lot of images, you see nothing that tell you what day it is..feels a bit lost - like the following. Overlaying the date here would make for a good experience in my opinion. |
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There's advantages to both, but having been a former user of the app that shall not be named, I appreciate the similarity in the UI to that particular application regarding the days - especially as not all Immich users are on iOS. :) (I'm an iOS user, not that it matters). I never know when pictures have been taken on Apple Photos without opening the individual photo. |
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I see your point. I am an IOS user and I still use google photos, and am not used to apple photos. But I think, if it adds some value, and is intuitive to the user, who not add some apple elements to Immich right? |
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I agree. I think that the immich app has a lot of empty space on the timeline, so you have to scroll more to find the photo you’re looking for. The main thing though would be to add the date at the top so you can always see it when scrolling. |
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In my case I prefer the dates on a plain background, it is much easier for me to see them than when they are on the photos. |
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This is looking great! While I am not a huge fan of the App-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named 'collections' page, I can see why others find it useful. My only question is, what will be the difference between the 'Albums' in the navigation bar and the 'Albums' group in the 'collections' page? It seems a little redundant. I see that in the collections page you can differentiate between 'albums in Immich' and 'albums on the device', will these not be available in the navigation bar 'Albums' page? |
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This is the feedback from scouting their subreddit. There are many folks mentioned that it takes many layers to get to the albums page, where it is one of the two most fundamental views, besides the timeline. So I decided to put them in the navigation bar for ease of access. |
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I agree. Photos and Albums are the two things I use most often, and I like that the new design gives quick access to them |
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Agreed. Photos, Albums and People (which is now under Collections). |
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Will the tags it be stored alongside the file in a proper xmp sidecar as well? |
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It will be stored in the XMP file on the server, so the mobile app just make requests to the Immich server |
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I'm concerned about losing the ability to see "Partner Photos" from the share tab. Will that be located somewhere else. My wife and I use that all the time. Thanks! |
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It will be located in the Collections page as well, below the grouping you are seeing in the screenshot |
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Thank you for the reply! Glad to hear that! |
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I like the new design, especially when I'm looking for an alternative to a well-known product, so I support similarities with it. |
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It would be nice that the mobile app allows searching people by name. Right now it still forces you to scroll through the list to find whoever you want. Also I guess not mobile specifically but OR filters would be nice. Like show me all the photos where X or Y person appear, not where both do. |
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This looks great, the new layout makes more sense definitely. Personally the tab I use most is the albums tab so making that more prominent seems solid. I did want to bring up having the search bar in the albums tab is nice, but personally I would prefer to have just the albums large and in charge on the albums tab with the sorting options and category bubbles (all, my albums, shared) It is slightly redundant with the search bar being in the album page as well as having its own dedicated tab. I understand for larger libraries having the search function directly in that tab could be helpful. A happy medium could be by default having the search bar on the album page collapsed and represented with a search bubble icon or smaller text box that expands. Overall the search bar on the album page is at the top of the visual hierarchy on the album page instead of the albums being the at the top level hierarchy which i think could reduce redundancy and better the UX. This could just be my experience so take it with a grain of salt. It looks great, wonderful work! Thank you immich team for all the work you’ve done! |
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This is a bit off topic, but I think the link sharing screen could use a bit of a revamp as well.
Apologies for the off topic-ness I can put this under feature requests. My friends were using a share link I sent yesterday and struggled with getting the photos downloaded mostly due to the things i stated above. |
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I'm not sure about the popup timeline. Imagine having 30 years of photos to scroll through. We need to be able to interact with the timeline quickly. Maybe a toggle to overlay it would suffice. |
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@ok1ok1 yeah that's true, I still feel like it takes up a lot of the screen on mobile share links |
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One suggestion: in the Photos view, add a possibility to filter on the status of the pictures (local only, remote only, local and remote). Most important in my eyes is at least a way to highlight all the pictures that are local only. For example use case: during an event with friends I shared an album with some pictures with possibility for them to upload. They upload pictures during the event and I take pictures without uploading them: then all my local only picture are spreaded in between all my friends' pictures. But I would like to cherry pick from my local only pictures the ones I want to upload. If the "on this device" album of the future "collections" will allow to launch uploads, then my use case is covered. |
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Say that hidden albums are added will they be accessed in the same way as in the forbidden fruit app? |
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While the mobile app is being worked on, please look into performance as well. My Pixel 8 Pro has horrible stutter while scrolling on the main timeline |
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Yeah, we will also look into performance in the near term; I've noticed that the app becomes really janky during the album sync process. It's a rather complicated process, so it might take us sometimes to resolve it completely |
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Upvote this comment, not only Android phones but my iPhone 15 pro becomes hot and the app is very laggy when syncing images. |
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Even when not syncing, the scrolling has been very stuttery for me. |
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Can confirm on Pixel 8 Pro, scrolling in the G Photos App is way smoother in comparison. I removed external library again, cause the app got really slow. Awesome, that performance improvements are planned! |
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Only issue I have with the mobile app aesthetically, is that the navigation bar is too tall, would love a more condensed version. |
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World be great if the bars would slide out of view while scrolling |
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Samsung Gallery has an option for "Fullscreen Scrolling" which basically does this. It's helpful. |
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Will there be a possibility to select more than one tag? Like 'holidays' and than eg. Spain or USA |
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Looks good! The new albums view would make using the app easier for the people I'm sharing a lot of albums with. Many of them use the app just to view the shared albums so I think there could also be an option in the settings for the default tab. That way I could set it to "albums" and the people who don't have their own photos but want to use the app to view shared would not need to see the "building the timeline" loading circle that never actually completes. Another setting that could be useful, but maybe outside the scope of this topic would be "show shared photos in timeline". I'm not sure how difficult this would be though as I have not explored that part of the codebase. |
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I think this is out of scope here, but I would also love a "show shared photos in timeline" option! |
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Good work on the app. I have some suggestions. The video explains it. |
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I had a think about it last night after reading through everything, and I have come around on a lot of it, so it looks promising. The one thing I am concerned about is how the flow will change with the loss of the Sharing tab. Before, shared links, partner sharing, and shared albums are there. A lot of that is moved under Collections now, I can see from above discussion, but (1) “Collections” is a somewhat opaque name, (2) partner sharing is now off-screen (I would have to scroll down), and (3) in terms of UI design, having extra taps for subcategories inside of “Collections” is non-ideal, but it will depend on how space is allocated. For the last point, what you have currently in Search is quite good: People and Places in separate side scrolling lists. That’s because frequent places and people will just be more easily accessible, whereas the proposed organisation of Collections relegates all of that to a forced two taps at minimum. You might consider organising it more similarly to how Search is organised, along with naming it something clearer than “Collections”. Hope that’s helpful, constructive criticism! 🙂 |
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Firtsly I want to say thank you for your great work. I'm really enjoying the self hosting journey using Immich. I'm interested to see how the tag view will look under the collections tab. With the tagging feature introduction in the web app, I started to really like it as a method for organising and viewing photos, although I would love the ability to search by tags and, from the Tag view itself, be able to do all the same multi-photo edits that are possile from the standard Photos/library view (including editing the tags). I realise tagging is very new and these features are possibly already in the pipeline. A little off topic - but with tags, I can see it being a possible solution to a small dillmema I've had - I'm yet to migrate my library from the app that must not be named because I'm reluctant to mix all my thousdands of average photos taken by my phone of the years with the current Immich library that mostly contains nice quality photos taken using our camera or from family photoshoots. I was thinking that having the option to have completely separate libraries that you could quickly flick between under the same account would be nice, but if I could auto-tag photos that upload from my phone album, and then view and manage them from the tags veiw, I think this would be satisfactory. I'm mentioning this here in case someone else has another suggestion on how to approach this, or can confirm that the necessary updates to the tags view/feature are coming :-) |
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A minor feedback on the 'Photos Tab'. When we multi select images, we see a few options. For so long, I never knew there were more options than the ones you see initially: Would be nice to have an overflow arrow or something indicating that there are more options. |
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Looking really great so far. Food for thought: Consider separating the functions currently proposed for collections as follows: COLLECTIONS: SEARCH ALBUMS: |
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One thing I would love to see is showing more than 6 assets at once. It’s great on the phone but this does not scale as good on IPad. And it’s probably worse on the bigger 12.9” ipad than my 11”. |
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Changes to mobile app layout and flows
Hello Immich fan,
With the recent addition of features such as folders and tags to the web client, we are working to add those views to the mobile app and update older features to provide a better user experience. Taking some inspiration from the App-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named and the Forbidden-Fruit, we are looking at the options below. We look forward to the discussion and feedback to make the UX as best as possible for you, your family, and your users. Please help us gather feedback from the users on your instance as well.
Navigation bar
We removed the
SharingandLibrarypages and replaced them withAlbumsandCollectionsso that you can easily access the two most used pages for viewing and managing your assets,PhotosandAlbumsAlbums page
This view includes all the albums you own or that are shared with you. It also includes a few utility tools.
The album thumbnail is now notably larger for ease of recognition.
Collections page
Since we've added many features, this page will be the place for quickly browsing the different grouping mechanisms provided by Immich. Below are some collections that will be present on this screen
Perhaps with some quick access buttons to the collection of Videos, Live Photos/Motion Photos, and recently added items.
We plan to work on those changes in the coming weeks. We are looking forward to discussing this with you!
Cheers,
Immich team
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