"Pinned" Albums

[cdzombak]

Enhancement

On my Lychee installation, I have essentially two types of albums:

1. Albums containing photos from a specific event/time (e.g. a solar eclipse)
2. Albums containing photos of similar subject across a long period of time (e.g. birds)

I plan to add to albums of type 2 as I shoot new photos (and as I backfill my Lychee site with photos from Flickr and my personal library). (This is because I often have ~1 photo of an interesting bird, for example, that is not from a particular event and that doesn't warrant creating a new album.) On the Lychee homepage, I would like to highlight these as "pinned" or "featured" albums, ideally moving them outside of the "Timeline" altogether.

My idea of "pinned" or "featured" albums would allow locating these albums above the timeline; something like this (done by hacking the page with dev tools; excuse the poor implementation!):

• Is this something Lychee would be interested in?
• Is there some way to achieve what I'm looking for now, without changes to the codebase?

[ildyria]

My idea of "pinned" or "featured" albums would allow locating these albums above the timeline; something like this (done by hacking the page with dev tools; excuse the poor implementation!

No worries, it does give a good overview of the idea.

Is this something Lychee would be interested in?

Yes.

Is there some way to achieve what I'm looking for now, without changes to the codebase?

Not without diving in the code.

I would be interested in such functionality, unfortunately, I do not have the time to spare to implement it. :(
However I do think it would be a great addition.

Before I can give you advise on implementation direction (if you feel like going for it), there needs to be a consideration:

1. What kind of albums can be "featured"? Only albums (with sub albums), or also Tag Albums?
2. If an album is featured, should it also appear in the list / timeline below ?

[cdzombak]

I would be interested in such functionality, unfortunately, I do not have the time to spare to implement it. :(

It's been many, many years since I worked in PHP, but given answers to our questions I'm happy to work on this. (This would also be a nice intro to the codebase before I attempt work on tag improvements, since tag autocomplete would be a great improvement IMO.)

[ildyria]

1. Also, what about smart albums (Unsorted, Starred, etc.)?

They are already "featured" by default I would say. So I would not consider those. Also that would make the logic significantly more complex.

3. Should "featured" albums be placed above or below Smart Albums? (Should this position be customizable?)

I would say above, we can see if there is a demand for customization later.

4. How are "featured" albums sorted within this section (last updated, last taken date, or alphabetically by title)?

I would say using existing sorting order. If that order is by title, then title it is, if that order is by min take date, then min take date it is. Though that ordering will probably need to be done on the collection instead of in DB...

A Featured/Pinned album would not also show up in the Timeline view. This indicates to me that perhaps "Pinned" is a more accurate name for the behavior I'd like.

That can also be considered as a setting whether to still show pin albums in below or not...

[ildyria]

(This would also be a nice intro to the codebase before I attempt work on tag improvements, since tag autocomplete would be a great improvement IMO.)

Look at this: #3063 😆

[cdzombak]

This makes sense. I'll work on a first pass at implementing the core of this feature, and we can iterate/improve before merging.

Look at this: #3063 😆

I already have! ;)

[ildyria]

Some parts where you want to look:
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Actions/Albums/Top.php
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Models/Album.php
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Models/BaseAlbumImpl.php < especially this one.
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Models/TagAlbum.php
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Models/Extensions/BaseAlbum.php

I would say that the is_pinned of is_featured flag should be on the BaseAlbumImpl.

To understand how access policies work:
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/app/Policies/AlbumQueryPolicy.php

If you have any questions, you can either ask here or ping me on discord. :)

[cdzombak]

@ildyria I have an implementation locally I think should work, but I would of course like to test it locally. Do you have any introductory documentation on local dev env setup & how to run my changes locally, ideally in Docker?