Android App, image location on replacement
Ferguson
Registered Users Posts: 1,345 Major grins
This is a niche issue, but maybe someone knows and will save me some time.
I have gigabytes of images, which I keep on the separate micro-SD card.
Periodically I upgrade my phone, and change to a new OS. When I do that, all app data on the primary storage is wiped, and it looks like a fresh install.
But all the images are still on the SD card.
What I'm finding I need to do is delete the (tens of thousands) of images from the SD card, and then re-download them. Even though they are there. There is no obvious way to tell Smugmug to shift to the SD card and "find" them even though they are in the same folder name (as best I can tell) that is going to use.
Which means going back through, folder by folder, and telling them to store offline. Dozens or hundreds of galleries.
And of course download time -- which is fine, I do not mind if the phone works hard, I just leave it over night. It's the work of re-selecting the folders that is painful, when they are already actually there.
Is there any way to have Smugmug "notice" them and use them?
Or... even better. Anyone remember when the Android was actually very smart, and noticed new galleries, did automated downloading. Smugmug "fixed" it, so it had the same brain dead features as the IOS version, and Android users had to be dumbed down rather than making IOS' version smarter. So they could have (I presume) a common code base.
At the time we were told they would come back and readdress such features in both.
Any chance that's going to happen? So we don't have to manually do things for each new gallery?
Comments
Hi Ferguson,
If the app data is wiped, the app can't know which photos on the SD card are which as the app data contains this crucial information. So unless there's an option to preserve app data during an OS upgrade, there's currently not an option to match up these photos on the SD to the actual photos on SmugMug. Note that this sounds like a limitation in the Android system as on iOS, upgrading to a new OS version keeps all the data of apps and the phone.
If you'd like to see a certain feature added, you could consider checking out the SmugMug feedback page.
There, you can vote and comment on existing suggestions or if you don't find what you're looking for, create your own. Our product management team is actively monitoring the suggestions made and takes them into account for future updates and new features.
All the best,
SmugMug Support Hero
Ah, well, fair enough. I thought perhaps it used predictable links (e.g. image ID's or some such) and so might reconstruct what was there.
The problem is some of us don't always do OS upgrades, but sometimes an OS replacement. IN my case I went from running Sony's version of Android to a Lineage (aka cyanogenmod) version, since Sony stopped doing updates, not even security updates. When you do a completely different OS you need to (or at least should) wipe the app data. But you don't (usually) need to wipe the SD card. I realize that this naturally leads to needing to reload, I was just hoping there was some trick the developers might know, like "rename it, load the app, close the app, rename it back, spin around four times and face north and restart the app".
The real issue is the brain dead nature.
As to the idea farm area, yeah, I know about it. In this case, to be fair, it was an EXISTING feature you decided to remove (the auto-download, not anything about OS replacements), but I think many of us who have been around a while are skeptical that area does anything that serve as a distraction.