Found this chain looking for existing âhidingâ feature requests⌠looks like the discussion pretty rapidly moved toward how to delete, but I would like to resurface the âhiddenâ flag concept.
I think there are two levels to this, probably⌠one is the âuser accessâ, lock pictures behind a password, they are absolutely not to be seen except by approved users.
But then there is a lesser level. Some pictures I may want to keep, but they just arenât very flattering, or the content is just a little offputting (I have a picture of a friend who had suffered an injury and sent me a picture - I want to keep it, but I donât really want it popping up in the random display list).
Not sure itâs high up the priority list, but thought I would toss it out there as another use case to mull over.
Another use case for hiding are photos of documents, receipts, or other one-off photos that I want to keep around âjust in caseâ, but really donât ever want to see when scrolling through the timeline view or other views.
In other software the term âarchiveâ is often used to hide items like this.
I decided on using âarchiveâ terminology instead of âhideâ as it aligns with Google Photos. (the icon for âhideâ and âshowâ arenât exactly intuitive, either).
Archived and trashed assets are not shown in tag galleries, nor are they shown in streams or when navigating left/right by date.
Hereâs a sneak peek of the button bar for an unliked, unarchived, and undeleted photo:
Search will include an âaction barâ when viewing deleted assets, which will include a âempty trashâ button that actually deletes files from the filesystem. Iâm building that bit today.
I nearly hate to ask, but any chance to have an option that disables or hides âtrashâ? In terms of making sure a family member canât trash something?
Accidentally archiving something is annoying⌠trash isnât.
Iâll add a setting that contains a pass phrase needed to empty the trash, that shouldnât be hard.
Edit: I misunderstood the request.
The next release will have 2 new boolean settings to disable the asset viewâs remove from library and delete buttons, and 2 additional boolean settings to disable the âactually do itâ buttons on the ârecently removedâ and ârecently deletedâ views.
@mrm I think @bdillahu asking for settings to disable the delete capability completely. That sounds like a reasonable request, but eventually what will probably be needed is some sort of admin login for edit/delete/archive. Without login, everything should probably be read-only.
edit: it doesnât need to be anything fancy like implement full fine-grained user/group/role management. Just a simple login with passphrase setting to enable edit capabilities.
Iâve also added âremove from libraryâ, so now there are three buttons to make an asset to away from tag galleries and (most) search results:
Not visible in tag galleries or search
Removed from library
Removed from disk
archive
remove
delete
Note that for âremoveâ and âdeleteâ the operations arenât âexecutedâ until someone clicks the âremove assetsâ or âempty trashâ button from the search pageâonly then do the records get moved into an exclude list of SHAs (so theyâre not imported again by accident) and, for deleted assets, all variations get deleted from (mounted) disk(s).
I thought about having an automatic âtrash is emptied automaticallyâ feature, but Iâm shelving that idea for this release.
I like the implementation of deleting images. It seems to work quite well and is nice for curating my collection. I think mulitple/bulk select in the grid view would be amazing to combine with the delete/hiding of photos.
How feasible is it to refresh the Trash page after successful deletion so it shows an empty Trash, instead of displaying the images that were just deleted? Is this even something other people would want to see after emptying the trash?
PhotoStructure | How to archive, remove, and delete photos and videos in your PhotoStructure library
When you click âEmpty trashâ, PhotoStructure only deletes currently-mounted files.
Files on unmounted drives are not deleted later. PhotoStructure tries to follow the principle of least astonishment.
By only deleting all file variations that are currently mounted and deletable, we avoid the unpleasant situation some months in the future where you mount a previously-imported volume and PhotoStructure starts deleting a bunch of asset variations in the background (that you may since have decided to keep, and restored from backup). If you want to be able to delete asset variations on new volumes that youâve previously deleted within PhotoStructure, ask on discord and letâs talk about it!
I prefer mentioning this here in the forum rather than in Discord just for easier future referenceâŚ
You provide a very good reason that PhotoStructure shouldnât automatically delete newly-imported images. But, I think an âImport Purgatoryâ would still be appropriate. âImport Purgatoryâ means the previously-deleted assets are imported directly into the Recycle Bin, but in a distinct section with separate buttons for restoring or deleting versus the regular buttons for everything else in the Recycle Bin.
I suspect that most often, users would want to re-delete previously-deleted assets, and would not be restoring accidentally-deleted assets from a backup as you suggest. Re-encountering previously-deleted assets in the PhotoStructure library is also astonishing behavior, for users who specifically remember deleting that asset and who imported a large folder of images from e.g. a family friend who happened to have many family photos that were duplicates, but mixed in with some photos that were new.
In any case, I definitely usually will want to re-delete previously-deleted assets. I use the chat application Telegram and have configured it to automatically save all sent/received photos and videos. There are legitimate images Iâve shared on Telegram that I simply donât want saved to my PhotoStructure library, for example temporary screenshots of maps and webpage forms. I do not want to have to re-delete them every time Telegram redownloads the image into my saved folder, and I re-import the updated directory of saved images into PhotoStructure with mostly-old but some new images. I want PhotoStructure to automatically re-delete and re-de-duplicate the assets.
I like those examples you gaveâI find those clarifying.
If I keep around all deleted file SHAs, I could have a setting that you could enable that deletes those SHAs as they are encountered by sync. It certainly would be off by default, though.
Another idea to consider â kinda like how Windows has regular âdeleteâ but also âpermanently deleteâ if you hold Shift+Del, PhotoStructure could have regular âdeleteâ that sends to recycle bin, but also âpermanently delete including future zombiesâ.
Regardless, I would still prefer newly-imported assets to be automatically sent to a âzombie import purgatoryâ section of the recycle bin, instead of being immediately permanently deleted. Itâs unlikely, but the SHA for two completely different images could accidentally match, so itâs safer for PhotoStructure to automatically quarantine the images rather than automatically delete them.