Album synchronization status and synchronization error status indicator needed.

[raphaelporsche]

First let me thank you for all your great work, this app has the potential to become a Google Photos replacement!
One of the most needed features is a sync-status indicator in the main window since this is the main feature of les pas (are my photos securely saved in nextcloud?). Something like green=all photos synced, yellow=sync in progress (progress bar?), red=sync error, button to manually start a sync attempt.

Let me explain. I was happily using lespas together with my wife for several days. I had created the lespas-folder through nextclouds external storage functionality (just a folder on the local hdd) so we both had access to the same lespas folder and our albums where always in sync. This worked perfectly for some days until suddenly the sync stopped working (maybe we created some kind of conflict e.g. by modifying album settings on one phone etc.). We didn't notice this because there where no error messages (I couldn't find any logs!). There currently is no indicator wheter photos are synced or when there are any sync errors. We each kept on adding photos to albums till I noticed that none of the changes were in Nextcloud and we each had completly different albums. So I had to manually export all the photos from lespas for each album and then manually fused the albums which was quite the effort.

In my opinion knowing that the photos are safely synced to nextcloud (in case I loose the phone) would be one of the most important features.
Thanks again for your effort!

[scubajeff]

My intention is to make the sync process solid enough that user would never need to worry about it at all, however, until that day comes, it'd better to add a setting item which user can view the sync log. Added this to milestone 2.3.9.

Whenever you open the app, it will sync with server once, provided that an applicable connection is established. So manual sync function it's not needed.

[raphaelporsche]

I fully understand your point. Nevertheless I think even with a perfect robust sync system there will still be the need for a prominent visual indicator wheter sync has finished. Sync takes its time and is never instantaneous, users can be in the guest wlan instead of private wlan, nextcloud server can be down, vpn can be disconnected and users might want to know when they can turn on airplane mode safely. Such an visual sync indicator wouldn't need much visual room (e.g. a colored led or checkmark which you can tap on to show the sync log). What do you think?

[scubajeff]

The sync is actually like a database log reply on the other side, where it stopped will always tell the cause of stopping.

[raphaelporsche]

What about this: The number one priority of les pas should be to ensure that there is no data loss and photos/videos and albums are securely saved. There will always be the possibility for the album-synchronization to fail (unstable network connection, les pas bug or Nextcloud error, see my referenced issue). In my opinion showing the synchronization status of the albums and indicating when there are synchronisation errors is essential and one of the most important features. Syncing the film roll isn't that important since it can be backed up by Nextcloud app itself or Syncthing but once you move photos/videos into les pas, they become locked into the les pas app. If les pas fails to synchronize there is the huge danger of data loss (currently without the user noticing before its to late).

[scubajeff]

Ordinary users just don't have the capacity to understand the log, so by just displaying message to them won't help. A status indicator might help showing the alert, but again won't do any help in solving the actually problem. To debug, my involvment is always needed, in this case, I will prefer the log message from server, just like what we did when we solved #32 together. That being said, your techinical background did help a lot.

Syncing is the very first issue I tackled, without this being as stable as it can be, anything else is gibberish. It's almost a year now since I started this project, I would say it's doing quite well, although I have to be more cautious introducing new features in the future.

[scubajeff]

Not exactly a fix for this issue, but release 2.4.6 will now show camera roll backup status in Backup Camera Roll setting menu's summary.