Editor: Google Photos are painfully slow to scroll through

[designsimply]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to https://wordpress.com/ > Blog Posts > (click any post).
2. In the Editor toolbar, click Add > Media from Google.
3. Try scrolling through images with a Google account that has a lot of images saved in it and try to find an image from a few years back.
4. Try using the search to find images.

Result: it's slow to scroll through Media from Google and searching for something like "Feb 2017" doesn't pull up date specific photos.

^{Seen at https://wordpress.com/post/cute.wordpress.com using Chrome 64.0.3282.167 on macOS 10.13.3.}

Video: 39s

I personally use Google Photos, so when I managed to find that option, I was excited. That’s a really nice way for me to get my images into my content. It is really painfully slow to try to scroll back through time to find old pictures if you have a lot though (and I’m on a really fast connection). And then I apparently hit a date limit? Couldn’t go back further than October 30. I guess it was a bug because it let me do it later. Might make sense to be able to jump back by date or something else, because if you have a lot of photos (which they heavily encourage), then this becomes really unwieldy for anything but your most recent photos.

/hat tip 🤠 @beaulebens for reporting this issue at p4k3M4-2uX-p2. #dogfooding #painpoint

[jakejones1984]

@designsimply I'm looking into this now. Will report back when I have more information.

it's slow to scroll through Media from Google

When I tested I wasn't too slow, but I appreciate it could be under different network conditions. Nonetheless, I'm perhaps more concerned that the UI doesn't provide the user with very good feedback that new items are loading. Watching your video I can see you scrolling and then waiting with no way to tell whether new photos are being loaded. Some better feedback from the UI would work well here to improve the perception of speed for the user. A loading spinner or a row of placeholder photos might work nicely here, what do you think?

And then I apparently hit a date limit? Couldn’t go back further than October 30

I've replicated this with my Google Photos account.

It appears there may be an issue with WPCOM hitting some upper limit of the number of photos it can retrieve. This may be due to the max_results limit on the Picasa API.

I can confirm there is a hard limit on the Picasa API. We are looking into alternative APIs to access the photos but there is no way around this if we have to stick with Picasa. (fyi: we'll explore UX improvements which may work around the limit issue)

Once you reach the "limit" the API reports that there are no more pages of photos to retrieve and that stops the UI from polling for more data (this is why you can't go back further). WPCOM also appears to be incorrectly reporting the next_page value. Mine went from 280 to 330 even though I only retrieve photos in batches of 20.

Might make sense to be able to jump back by date or something else, because if you have a lot of photos (which they heavily encourage), then this becomes really unwieldy for anything but your most recent photos.

Agreed an "infinite load" UI here isn't good UX when trying to select older photos. Some UI to allow jumping to a particular date might be useful, or even a date range style date picker interface.

[jakejones1984]

searching for something like "Feb 2017" doesn't pull up date specific photos.

Update on this. This is an undocumented aspect of Picasa and is not fully support by Google. As a result, as we move towards Google Photos API this feature will have to be dropped. Hopefully the impact of this can be mitigated by the inclusion of better UI around

1. Date filters
2. Album access

[stale]

This issue has been marked as stale and will be closed in seven days. This happened because:

• It has been inactive in the past 9 months.
• It isn't a project or a milestone, and hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] Blocker`, `[Pri] High`, `[Status] Keep Open`, or `OSS Citizen`.

You can keep the issue open by adding a comment. If you do, please provide additional context and explain why you’d like it to remain open. You can also close the issue yourself — if you do, please add a brief explanation.

[stale]

This issue has been marked as stale and will be closed in seven days. This happened because:

• It has been inactive in the past 9 months.
• It isn't a project or a milestone, and hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] Blocker`, `[Pri] High`, `[Status] Keep Open`, or `OSS Citizen`.

You can keep the issue open by adding a comment. If you do, please provide additional context and explain why you’d like it to remain open. You can also close the issue yourself — if you do, please add a brief explanation.