📂 Use subfolder for Talk attachments, one per conversation

[PVince81]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

1. All attachments from all conversations appear in the same "Talk" folder. When dealing with lots of conversations, the number of files is very high.
2. The attachments are shared with many people, as single file shares. So the "Share overview" becomes too crowded and barely usable.
3. Could technicall help solving Opening viewer cycle through all share talk medias #3347 to view all attachments in the slideshow for a single conversation.

Describe the solution you'd like

• Store the attachments using one subfolder per conversation
• Use folder shares to share with all participants
• Offer to "unshare from self" when leaving a conversation.

Not sure what name to use for the subfolder. The room name is intangible and might change. But the room id is too technical.

Further benefits
It would also make it possible to sync files posted to specific conversations also instead of all.
It would also make it possible to add a button to toggle between the attachment folder and the conversation, for #1577

Further ideas

In theory it could even make it possible to auto-post a file to a conversation just by adding it to the folder (but needs to track what was already posted and duplicates, maybe too fancy and not useful...)

[nickvergessen]

This was discussed in depth over a long time. The main issue is that you need to move/rename when a conversation name changes, people can have multiple conversations with the same name, in which case you need to resolve duplicates and so on.

[PVince81]

This was discussed in depth over a long time. The main issue is that you need to move/rename when a conversation name changes, people can have multiple conversations with the same name, in which case you need to resolve duplicates and so on.

And also consider that people like to move stuff around, so they might move files out of that folder... So would need to reduce permissions for stuff inside that folder so they don't take anything out (but copying is fine). This could also be seen as a drawback to some.

For the name issue, we could decide to only set the conversation name (and deduplicate) initially, then leave as is.
People are already used that for received share folders, they can move them anywhere and rename and only they see that change. This is sometimes seen as a problem though, so if we had a general solution for "remotely changing the name for every recipient" then it would apply here as well and be part of the sharing code.

Just now on master I tried renaming a file I posted as "original_name.jpg" to "new_name.jpg". Then I checked if the other participants see the rename: they don't. So I'd assume that people already know how sharing works in NC and that received stuff can be moved around freely.

[PVince81]

Group folders idea

Or what if each conversation would receive a "group folders" style common folder. The goal would be to only have a single instance of every file without the need of having any share attached.
The group folders can be addressed by id.

Could also make it work for guest app users and regular guests if we can give them access, as these usually don't have quota space for uploads (ref #4138 (comment)) but also we don't allow to use another user's shared folder.

[PVince81]

Virtual FS idea

Yet another more complicated idea to implement: have the Talk app store the attachments somewhere else, like thumbnails.
The talk app would then mount a read-only virtual folder for every user which is backed by the app itself, and present a folder structure "Talk/$conversationName/$attachmentName".
It would also need to provide etags in case of conversation renames or attachment deletion (when deleting messages).

Duplicates would need to be resolved when generating the names to be displayed.

But it also means that expose virtual FS would need to limit itself to the conversations visible to the user, or already joined. So the second level would be backed by the database. Hmmm...

However like for thumbnails there could be storage quota issues as this makes it more difficult to track and prevent exceeding the quotas.

[nickvergessen]

Yet another more complicated idea to implement: have the Talk app store the attachments somewhere else, like thumbnails.

been there, discussed that. Not gonna happen es we loose viewer, trashbin and versions on the way

[PVince81]

been there, discussed that.

Sadly not in a ticket?

we loose viewer, trashbin and versions on the way

Not if it's mounted as storage in the FS by implementing the Storage interface. It would gives read-only Webdav access like any external storage, in which case any apps can access the files and also sync them down.

[nickvergessen]

Should be in #1811 or any of the linked issues/prs

[hugodu69]

Group folders idea

Or what if each conversation would receive a "group folders" style common folder. The goal would be to only have a single instance of every file without the need of having any share attached. The group folders can be addressed by id.

Could also make it work for guest app users and regular guests if we can give them access, as these usually don't have quota space for uploads (ref #4138 (comment)) but also we don't allow to use another user's shared folder.

I would love something like that !
i create groups and i don't give them local storage (only 1Go), i only share a folder with them, in which they have plenty of space. But then, the talk folder is outside this shared group folder, so that's really limited in storage space. I'm not the only one in this situation, as i see here

I imagine i could configure what attachment folder to use for a conversation when i create it, that would be awesome :) in addition, maybe each user could change it for what they want ?

[PVince81]

or if too complicated due to renames, move the attachments into timestamp directories, ex: "/Talk/2022-10-10".
but it could still happen that one of such folders has a lot of entries