I would really like to use the storage already in use on OC and have gallery access and functionality like what’s available with Google Photos. The easiest solution would seem to be giving the gallery app access to the local OC storage where it can display the photos available as well as categorize and place into albums. However, I understand a not-so-recent update to the app introduced scopes for security purposes that prevents this. The OC app is… functional, but difficult to use when trying to scroll through a large quantity of pictures, especially with the thumbnail generation issue where the server stops providing updates after a short time. Is there any solution for this?
Actual behaviour
Gallery app(s) cannot access OC storage but files manager can
Expected behaviour
Desired behavior is the ability to replace Google Photos with those already uploaded to OC; allow the gallery access to a folder and browse the photos therein
Steps to reproduce
Connect to OC server using the android app
Observe files in file explorer
Note inability to access storage in gallery app
Can this problem be reproduced with the official owncloud server?
(url: https://demo.owncloud.org, user: test, password: test)
Yes
oC files are only accesible via documents provider (SAF), because Google restrictions. That means, other apps can only access it if have the documents provider integrated. There is no other way, unfortunately.
Just a comment, oC app does not generate thumbnails, they are directly retrieved from the server and displayed. I agree that the process of displaying is not very fast… something we should think about!
Thank you for clearing up what I suspected was going on with Android restrictions. This method of, what I call streaming, is something that Google Photos and iCloud does really well and I wish OC could do the same. It’s not a great experience to have to set up the backup, backup my files, then download the files again and have to view them through the OC app. I wish it was possible to just “stream” the image instead of saving locally with a gallery-like skin to be able to search or sort by date and create albums. Does OC or any other add-on app offer this kind of feature?
As for the thumbnails - it would be very nice if the responsiveness could be improved or perhaps the thumbnails cached locally once created!
Coming back to this after figuring out a non-OC way of accomplishing my goal. I eventually landed on PhotoPrism to display the libraries I gave it access to in the OC storage pool on my NAS. I recognize that this circumvents OC’s file management but the gallery in the app is just so impractical I don’t even care.
Now the OwnCloud app does its automatic backup from the phone and every 3 hours PhotoPrism refreshes its index and lets me view them remotely without duplicating and doubling storage for every file I want to see. Plus it lets me do very Google-Photos-like things such as organizing by date, face recognition, and AI-powered object recognition. It’s a really cool piece of software, just wish I didn’t have to use it…