1028751 - Gallery Image Loading and Display Order are different

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Gallery, defect)

Description

[Nilay Binjola]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140608211622

Steps to reproduce:

Store some images on device or external storage (preferably many and high quality) and run the Gallery application.


Actual results:

The thumbnails load on the Gallery pane, oldest first. But are displayed latest first. This causes thumbnails to shift forward as new thumbnails are loaded making it hard to access image for preview in the adjacent pane.


Expected results:

Thumbnails and images should be loaded on the gallery pane in the same order they are displayed. This will append thumbnails and let the user access them easily. Preferably, latest first.

Comment 1

[Mozilla_BEC]

I can confirm this same behavior on my ZTE Open using v1.1(zte), v1.2(zte), v1.3(lin76r), and v2.1(svn).

Comment 2

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Confirming as per comment 1.

Comment 3

[Sri Kasetti]

The current behavior is as designed.
We are considering various gallery UI modifications for gallery visual refresh.
This will be considered as part of that re-design

Comment 4

[Mozilla_BEC]

(In reply to Sri Kasetti from comment #3)
> The current behavior is as designed.
> We are considering various gallery UI modifications for gallery visual
> refresh.
> This will be considered as part of that re-design

Is there a best place to put recommendations for other layouts/features for this upcoming refresh?

Comment 5

[Wayne Chang [:wchang]]

Not a bug according to the comments.

Comment 6

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

(In reply to nilaybinjola from comment #0)

> 
> Expected results:
> 
> Thumbnails and images should be loaded on the gallery pane in the same order
> they are displayed. This will append thumbnails and let the user access them
> easily. Preferably, latest first.

Unfortunately, we can't control this order. The gallery is asking the DeviceStorage API to enumerate all new files on the sdcard. Gallery processes the results in the order in which they arrive. In the past, we've had an intense focus on minimizing the startup time of the app and pipelining this scanning process to be as fast as possible has been part of that, even though it leads to this bad experience on first startup.

I'm reopening this bug because there are things we can do about it...

Dave Hylands says that device storage completes it enumeration before it returns anything, so it might not be substantiall any slower to enumerate all the files and sort them before processing the metadata.  Also, we could probably mimimize the UX flashing problem if we created blank thumbnails for each of the new files when we first found them and then later filled them in once the thumbnails were created.

None of these changes are easy, but they would improve the user experience. If we separate the thumbnail processing from the mediadb scanning step (as we have done for the Video app) that would improve startup and would also help solve bug 1039943 as well.

Comment 7

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

I think we should also see if we can come up with a good solution to bug 864674 while working on this bug.

Comment 8

[Mozilla_BEC]

David, what do you think about an optional File/Folder view in addition to the chronological storage structure agnostic model employed currently?

It'd likely ameliorate much of the shuffling and flashing, and it would allow people like myself quick & logical access to images I use often (memes, pictograms, etc) without having to mindlessly scroll backwards until I happen across them.

Comment 9

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Brett,

That is actually one of the features our UX team has just designed. It is not clear whether we will get it implemented in version 2.1, but it is something we are going to work on.

Comment 10

[Mozilla_BEC]

(In reply to David Flanagan [:djf] from comment #9)
> Brett,
> 
> That is actually one of the features our UX team has just designed. It is
> not clear whether we will get it implemented in version 2.1, but it is
> something we are going to work on.

David, that sounds fantastic. Is there a way I can talk to you & your team further on this point?
The Samsung dumbphone platform has a great variety of sort methods to choose from, and I think taking a page from Desktop file browsers grouping methods might also be beneficial in conjunction with the various sort methods.

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on