UX: Problems with the display of videos

[marcosilva85]

Hi,
I'm reporting here 3 issues, but hoping that they're "low-hanging fruit" that could easily be resolved.

What is not working as documented?

1. When viewing an album, we start by opening the first photo then start to slide forth, but its hard to detect when its a video coming in. I believe this is caused by 3 things: a) in other gallery software, videos always autoplay when navigated-into, b) lack of a play icon on top of the content itself to quickly identify its interactive, and c) when the frame is clicked, the content actually goes away to the thumbnails view (instead of playing it).
2. In thumbnail mode, the white play-icon used to show its a video is too faint and lacks an outline. Since its on top-left, sometimes it goes on top of a photo with white sky or clouds and then is barely noticed.
3. Slideshow could have a distinct icon so not to confuse ppl that the content its not a video.

What behavior do you expect?

1. a) Video auto-plays or b) add play icon in the middle of it to quickly identify as video (e.g youtube), and please also allow to start the video when the frame is clicked.
2. Add a black outline to play icon.
3. Ideas for a slideshow icon != than the play: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/slideshow

Its anedoctal but some family members told me they did not knew the albums I've shared contained videos, this made me think on the why.
Let me know what you think ;)

[lastzero]

This seems to relate to the following feature (request), which is already on our roadmap:

• UX: Add a hybrid Photo/Video Viewer (Lightbox) #1307

[marcosilva85]

I read the issue linked, and since it aims for a full refactor, it's is nature to touch many things, so I wouldn't make this a way to block other simpler improvements like these small UX changes until then.
But as I don't have any kind of stake on this, the planning of it is yours, I can help only with sharing issue reports/feedback. ;)

[lastzero]

Note that I've been trying to improve the usability of our current video player over the weekend, not with a focus on this particular issue though. You can now find the result in a feature branch or you can use the current photoprism/photoprism:test image on Docker Hub.

With these changes, the player for example supports playing multiple videos like the photo viewer when you press the left and right keys on the keyboard. However, I have found that much more is needed to make this work well on all mobile browsers/devices, especially Apple iOS. Achieving good stability, as with the current solution (which lacks features, yes), also takes time.

So instead of adding more workarounds that are ultimately insufficient and might break existing features on top of that, I think we should develop a unified photo and video viewer as soon as we have some time (more than one day on the weekend) to do so.