images

[ivanjx]

it seems this app has zero support for images, which is critical for my notes. please add support for:

• showing images
• adding images
• deleting images

thank you

[oli-ver]

The reason probably was that the Nextcloud Notes API did not support uploading, fetching or deleting attachments like images. At least uploading and fetching is now supported, the pull request was just merged to main:
nextcloud/notes#1600
https://github.com/nextcloud/notes/blob/main/docs/api/v1.md#get-attachment-get-attachmentid
https://github.com/nextcloud/notes/blob/main/docs/api/v1.md#put-attachment-post-attachmentid

@mpivchev @i2h3 would this be worth to consider now?

[i2h3]

The complete lack of image support is a known and historically inherited issue and would require some extended amount of work. Indeed, the attachments API is very new and without it the whole handling would not be possible (without rewriting everything on scratch based on WebDAV instead of the Notes API). It now at least becomes more realistic to implement.

Still I would consider a single replacement for the native and online editors which basically is the web editor seamlessly embedded in the app in kind of an offline mode a better way to pursue than to further extend the current native editor. It also has some more basic flaws in regard to highlighting and binds a lot of resources for reinventing the wheel which could be better invested in scope of the project.

Note: I moved to the desktop client team for macOS file provider and thus no longer can dedicate time to the iOS Notes app.

[oli-ver]

Thanks for the feedback @i2h3. I had a look at the code and was thinking I could perhaps contribute something. A complete refactoring though I am not sure I would be able to cover. Would it make sense to at least load the images for now in the native editor? Uploading would be helpful too, but not seeing the images added at all is the first and bigger issue in my eyes.

Embedding the web editor means you would add this as kind of external npm library or Git Subrepo? If we have a deeper understanding how this should be implemented perhaps this can at least in parts be contributed.

Who is maintaining this project now that you moved to the desktop client?

[i2h3]

I had a look at the code and was thinking I could perhaps contribute something.

You are welcome! We are very happy about community contributions.

Would it make sense to at least load the images for now in the native editor?

I have no experience yet with rich text editing in UIKit controls. Hence I cannot comment on that topic.

Embedding the web editor means you would add this as kind of external npm library or Git Subrepo? If we have a deeper understanding how this should be implemented perhaps this can at least in parts be contributed.

Earlier this year when I was thinking through the existing project I also took a step back and thought about how I would implement it in case I could start from scratch to have some orientation for the future. I looked into our Notes web app and figured that the editor used there is a standard library. So in a nutshell: build a simple offline single page app, bundle it as resources in the native app and present it in a WKWebView. Through JavaScript injection the note content can be set and retrieved. And tada, you nearly have the same editing experience as in the web but a bit more smoothly and quite close to native editing. The attachments and images handling would require a bit more work but that is the main thing.

Who is maintaining this project now that you moved to the desktop client?

Formally, @mpivchev and @marinofaggiana are responsible as developers at the moment.

[oli-ver]

Thanks @i2h3 for the feedback and insights. I will work on understanding the project code and the visualization in the web app in more depth. If we can handle synchronization and visualization independent from each other, perhaps we could start with synchronizing the attachments and then in a second step think about visualization. If I understand correctly this would anyways just mean replacing the whole visualization part and showing the synchronized markdown content including the images. Perhaps we could create a separate refactoring issue with the already available details for this?

From the initial request from @ivanjx we could handle the adding images part first. Deleting images could at least be done locally if a note does not contain the reference anymore. Not sure how we delete attachments in the web app, this needs some more investigation.

[oli-ver]

@i2h3 I began implementing the first part of the "show images" requirement: To load and store the attachments in the ios app.

Before I am going any further with this, is this in general what you would have in mind when using the attachment API? I would now as a next step try embedding this into the PreviewWebView.

Disclaimer: The whole thing was heavily supported by ChatGPT5 as I really have no experience with Swift development yet. This is in fact the first time I tried it other than in "Hello World" tutorials, so it is a little risky for me to use LLMs at this stage, because I might not understand everything completely that was generated.

[i2h3]

The attachments API is so recent that I learned about it just now after I switched teams, so I cannot state about what I had in mind, sorry! 😬

[oli-ver]

Ok no worries I will for now just go ahead and try to load the images from the attachment storage next.

What is also missing is to delete them from cache again if they have been removed from the note. Also not sure if image attachments are deleted on the server in case we delete an image in the text in the Nextcloud notes web app. This needs some more exploration.