Ideas to make point-attached photos/videos far more useful & robust

Eric Wilson shared this idea 15 months ago
Gathering feedback

I love using Locus especially for hike/photography outings and location scouting.

The ability to add photos to saved points is incredibly useful. But 2 stumbling blocks have given me all sorts of grief, especially with a recent reset/new device. I've spent 10-20 hours trying to clean it up. As a result, I would love to offer a couple of feature suggestions/requests.

(Somewhat in theme as this post: [https://help.locusmap.eu/topic/storage-location-of-waypoint-attached-photos] but additional & different ideas.)

1. backup manager: needs to prominently warn that media are not backed up!

(I've permanently lost many photos some time ago due to not understanding this and migrating to a new device.)

2. better backup options:

  • please add an option to include media in backup - especially if to-cloud & on wifi
  • (Seems crazy that the most important user data is not easily backed up. And that this is a surprise to so many users.)

3. better media folder choices (like above post) - ideally sub-dirs of /DCIM/ which many other things can easily see and backup

Another major issue is with attaching existing media to a point. When that media is eventually moved or renamed, Locus point's attachment is forever broken. This also ruins the ability to use Locus for good scouting & reference.

Here's the real - would blow me away awesome - feature I would love.

4. Option to separately save the photo that was taken - e.g. under /DCIM/Locus/... but keep a smaller resolution copy inside Locus data - which is backed up with Locus data. This should work the same for either photographed from within Locus (save 2-copies) or when attaching an existing one (make separate smaller copy).

Ideally this would have a) a global-default setting, like {always save duplicate, ask each time, ...} with preferred resolution like {640px, 1080px, full-res}. I would love to have it default to my preferred setting but let me skip the duplicate on case-by-case since some are only relevant when re-visiting a location. (The trail is "that way" for example.)

This way I can keep the 12-megapixel or whatever photo, move it, rename it, treat it like all my other photos on the device. But remain assured that Locus won't trip and fall forever losing the photo-links I've worked hard to make. Also, ones used inside Locus (for me) never need to be more than about 768px or 1080px in size. It's just for phone/tablet screen review. But as camera-phones are getting so good, often the photo is good for my permanent collection which I always move off-device and rename, etc.

I'm a photographer. It's painful and time-consuming (and hard to remember) having to take a special separate pic for Locus along with my "normal" scouting pics and to make extreme efforts to backup Locus data different than every other app I use. Being able to separate & smaller copies means I could leave hundreds of images attached to Locus with only taking a few 10s of MB storage, and having peace of mind they won't be lost with a good reliable regular backup.

(I recently had to wipe/reset a device in a bit of unplanned way. Trying to recover & restore Locus was by far - 10x or so - the most difficult case out of more than 100 apps. Partly because I use it so deeply and its power. But partly because of these 1 or 2 oversights in expected behavior. It took about 1/2 of the total effort of getting my device back to where I had it. And some content is lost forever.)

Thanks for your consideration.

Replies (2)

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For ref- I finally had to start a whole separate to-do list for Locus to try to sort this all out. :)

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The backup with media doesnt seem a good option, backups are more so you can revert to a certain date


what would better is for photos to sync to locus cloud storage, then the web planner points would have photos as well.

Most of the problems are caused by recent android permissions, because of these I ahve stoppd using photos with points untill there are improvements....


Having copies of photos but at a smaller resolution sounds disastrous as it would cause confusion as to which is the original/preffered one...


But photos does need improvements

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Sounds like this wouldn't be features you'd be interested in. Gotcha. I hope the comment doesn't dissuade others from considering it, however.

I do love the idea of syncing to a Locus cloud (also) if wanted because of the online map. (Though even custom icons I'd personally want even more.)

For me, I completely disagree on the other points. Backup: I've never reverted to some arbitrary time, I only want to recover on a new device or in case of disaster. So I want all relevant data, not just some. Or to clone to a 2nd device like a tablet, I'd want icons and images also, not just settings. Re. duplicate copies--in no way do I want my "real" images forever on my device. I use many devices for photos and I manage them far better than any phone-app does. Leaving a tiny copy 'attached' with my Locus dataset makes perfectly good sense. Otherwise I'd need to manually know which magic ones (of hundreds) to "leave" on the phone vs. not to. Or, as I currently try to do -- take an image within Locus and then immediately one with my normal camera app. This is far worse. (I'm a data-architect by training/vocation, so I understand the deep evils of data duplication. I weigh those tradeoffs carefully. :) )

I'll be interested if these ideas resonate with others.

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Point 1 i agree, this is a trivial and sensible

Point 2, most of the settings, even small things like presets, screen layouts are tiny in size. even 1 single photo could be the same size as an entire backup. so unless backup frequency was very low, and even once a month would be absolutely massive backup.

the reason for the backups, is that a lot of people want to revert data//points to a specific time, or transfer a different set to a different device. so only having the latest backup doesnt really help.


Perhaps an option to backup the locus media to a sperate local file only, but then that would need to be transferred. even of the images were small, would be a large backup file, most people would want full size, not just thumbnails...they might not realise the larger images arent there when they restore backup and have just low res images.


As backups are to google drive, would be better for images to sync somewhere and not be part of backup

or

for images to be part of local fielsystem and backedup/synced seperate to locus, which is what most users are doing.

We cant use the google photos to attach images, can sort of with dropbox by using the url field of a point.


If locus could store users photos on tehir cloud, that might be a start.

Having photos suplicated to locus would be a pain for some, as they dont want 2 sets of photos...

thats why the geotagged photos layer is nice....





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I just came across this thread and learned that photos taken by Locus are not backed up. So what do you actually do to back these up? Some kind of manual process? Thank you!

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Alan, ive stopped using photos with locus, but you could use a seperate app like foldersync pro, to sync photos to a cloud storage in the mean time......

IF the photos are stored in sdcard/DCIM or similar, and not inside the locus data folder

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