UX: Option to archive photos from within albums

[Leonetienne]

As a user, I would like the menu in albums to include the "Archive" action so that I can archive pictures directly without having to select them and then switch back to a regular results view.

Original feature request:

I have created a new Album, and uploaded hundreds of pictures "to it”. I did this by selecting the album in the upload dialog.

I now want to archive all images in this album, to delete them later. Because I, let's say, uploaded the wrong folder.

So I go the the album, shift-select all images, which is very easy and intuitive since it's just good old "select all + delete", open the context menu expecting to see "archive", but it's not there.

Apparently, the only option to archive them is to leave the selection of all images I want to delete, which I already have, go to the search page, where I see thousands of pictures, all mixed, most of them I do not want to delete, google how to form the search query album:"Vacation Netherlands Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam", without a single typo, and without checking the spelling since going to the album list clears my search query, and only then can I select all + archive.

I don't have to say that this is the exact opposite of "good" user experience. This is horrid. Having to delete images in two steps (archive->delete) is already bad enough, but making it so unintuitive and needlessly complex to archive images you have already selected..? why?

Why can't I just archive them from the album view? This would close the circle of the UX flow upload to album -> view images in said album -> delete/archive images from within said album. Fetching the file relation from the file/album mm-object should be possible.

Also, this opens up a gigantic pitfall: Accidentally clicked the "remove from album" button? That's a shame, because now you will not be able to filter out the images you want to delete in the search page AT ALL. Now you will have to sieve through thousands of images, by hand.

But surely nobody would do this. It's just that the "remove from album" button looks very similar to the "archive" button, and is exactly where you would expect the "archive" button to be. The fact that it does not even warn you that it's about to unlink the images from the album does certainly not help.

Screenshot of the improved album action menu, which will be released shortly:

[aaronrudkin]

So, here's a partial workaround -- I don't think this precludes the feature request (though maybe it will dial down the, uh, stridency, around it) -- go into album view, select the images, then click on the main Search stream. The images will remain selected. From here, the eject/remove from album button is replaced with the archive button and you can archive from there. You don't need to do any kind of fancy searching or going through folders or anything like that, the selected images should hold across the facets.

Here's some screenshots showing I just did that:

Selecting photo from "Text Message and Screenshots album":

Click search facet, observe 1 photo is still selected and archive option is present:

Click archive, go back to album, image has now been removed from album and archived:

Hope this helps. Again, I don't think this takes away from the fact that, as you point out, having the archive icon disappear and be replaced by a similar looking icon can contribute some confusion. But you can make progress dealing with your album in the meantime.

[kevincox]

I would like this too. I commonly do something similar where I move a group of related photos into an album to review them. I will then add some to a "highlights" album and archive some (like photos of the inside of my pocket). Not having the archive option in albums is quite annoying.

I have found myself marking these as "private" then going to my private folder to archive them (since I don't have much in the private folder additions are easy to find) but this is extra steps and only works for me due to low use of "private".

[graciousgrey]

We plan to re-design the context-menu for mobile devices. Once this is done we can add more actions to it (which will also be helpful to implement other feature requests).

[lastzero]

I've enabled the menu action in our preview build so you can test this. Phone screens are larger than they were a few years ago, so even without changes to the menu, I think there should be enough space (except on very old devices). Once the build is complete, you can also test this on our public demo at https://demo.photoprism.app/.