BACKLOG.md

oCIS Photo Add-on - Backlog

Last Updated: January 18, 2026

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Priority Legend

• 🔴 High - Core functionality or UX issues
• 🟡 Medium - Nice to have improvements
• 🟢 Low - Future considerations

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🚨 Critical Bugs

🟡 BUG: Intermittent First Load Failure

• First load sometimes fails with "Failed to search photos" error
• Second load/refresh works fine
• Suspected race condition or initialization timing issue
• May be related to oCIS service startup, authentication, or space discovery
• Repro: Hard refresh the page, sometimes first load fails
• Workaround: Refresh the page again

🔴 BUG: HEIC Images Not Supported (Backend)

• Add HEIC/HEIF image format support to oCIS
• HEIC files (Apple's default photo format since iOS 11) do not display in oCIS
• Neither thumbnails nor full images load - broken in both photo-addon AND core oCIS file browser
• Example file: IMG_20251013_174320.heic
• Impact: iPhone photos saved in HEIC format are completely unusable
• Requires: Backend changes - likely needs HEIC codec/decoder in thumbnail service
• Possible solutions:
  • Add libheif support to oCIS thumbnail generation
  • Server-side conversion to JPEG on upload
  • Browser-side HEIC decoding (heic2any.js) as fallback

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Upstream Contribution Status

🔴 Backend PR #11912 - Photo EXIF Metadata Search

• PR submitted: owncloud/ocis#11912
• Initial review received from @kobergj (Jan 16, 2026)
• Linter fix applied (commit 7500db70)
• Replied to maintainer's question about map lookup logic
• SonarCloud cognitive complexity fix (commit 9404bb14)
• PENDING: Await final approval and merge
• Branch: feature/photo-metadata-search
• Changes: Bleve index photo fields, KQL query support, WebDAV properties

🟡 Web Extensions Contribution

• Draft proposal created for owncloud/web-extensions repo
• Submitted issue to web-extensions repo proposing photo-addon and advanced-search
• Received positive response from maintainer - "this is awesome, please go ahead!"
• Wait for maintainer feedback on clarifying questions
• Fork and restructure to web-app-photos and web-app-advanced-search
• Update license from Apache-2.0 to AGPL-3.0
• Submit PRs after backend PR merges

🔴 Deployment Example Updates (Requested by Maintainer)

• Update ocis_full deployment example after web-extensions PR accepted
• Add .env entry: #PHOTOADDON=:web_extensions/photoaddon.yml
• Create web_extensions/photoaddon.yml with init container config
• Add CSP configuration for Leaflet.js CDN and OpenStreetMap tiles
• Test deployment with Docker Compose
• Reference: https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/blob/master/deployments/examples/ocis_full/

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Phase 2: UI/UX Improvements

✅ Lightbox Date Display Cleanup (Complete)

• Replace "Date Source: photo.takenDateTime" with simpler "Date Taken" label
• Add small indicator badge beside date: "(EXIF)" (green) or "(Mod time)" (gray)
• Cleaner, less technical presentation for end users

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Phase 2: Stack & Grouping Logic

🟡 Stack Cover Selection

• Integrate with PhotoPrism image quality scoring
• Use highest quality image as stack "face"
• Fallback to most recent if no quality data

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Phase 3: Photo Actions & Context Menu

🟡 Share Button

• Quick share button in lightbox view
• Copy link to clipboard
• Share via oCIS sharing dialog

🟡 Tagging in Lightbox

• View existing tags in popup
• Add new tags directly
• Remove tags
• Tag autocomplete from existing tags

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Phase 4: Map View

✅ Map Integration (Complete)

• Map view UI with Leaflet.js + OpenStreetMap
• Cluster markers for nearby photos
• Click marker to open photo in lightbox
• Click cluster to zoom in
• GPS coordinates returned by backend
• Map tile gap CSS fix
• "View on Map" from individual photo
• Search for all files within visible map bounds (future enhancement)

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Phase 5: PhotoPrism Integration

🟢 Face Recognition

• Connect to PhotoPrism API for face detection
• Inject person tags into oCIS metadata
• Face-based photo grouping/filtering
• "People" view showing faces with photo counts

🟢 AI Quality Scoring

• Retrieve image quality scores from PhotoPrism
• Use for stack cover selection
• Filter/sort by quality

Implementation Notes

• Requires PhotoPrism instance running alongside oCIS
• Need to map PhotoPrism library to oCIS file paths
• Consider webhook for automatic processing of new uploads

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Phase 6: Additional Features

🟢 Albums & Collections

• Create named albums
• Add photos to albums (without moving files)
• Album sharing
• Smart albums (auto-populated by criteria)

🟢 Slideshow Mode

• Full-screen slideshow
• Configurable timing
• Transition effects
• Background music support (?)

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Phase 7: Mobile Development

🟢 Mobile App Investigation

• Research Flutter vs React Native vs PWA
• Evaluate oCIS mobile SDK availability
• Consider PWA approach first (lower effort)
• Native app for iOS/Android if PWA insufficient

Mobile-Specific Features

• Offline photo viewing (cached)
• Auto-upload from camera roll
• Background sync

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Technical Debt

• Add unit tests for new components (48 tests in usePhotos.spec.ts)
• Add E2E tests framework (Playwright) with tests for gallery, lightbox, map view
• Performance optimization for large libraries (10k+ photos)
• Accessibility audit (keyboard navigation, screen readers)
• i18n/localization support (useI18n composable with EN, DE, FR translations)
• Code complexity audit - Refactored and simplified code
  • Consolidated types into types/index.ts
  • Cleaned up usePhotos.ts - removed debug logging, extracted utility functions
  • Updated components to use centralized i18n

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Completed ✅

Backend (oCIS Fork)

• Photo metadata in Bleve search index with Store=true
• KQL photo field queries (cameraMake, cameraModel, takenDateTime, etc.)
• WebDAV oc:photo-* properties in search results
• GPS coordinates exposed in WebDAV search results
• PR #11912 submitted to upstream
• Linter fix (commit 7500db70) - moved comment for formatting
• Cognitive complexity refactor (commit 9404bb14) - extracted appendPhotoProps/appendLocationProps
• Thumbnail cropping fix (aspect ratio preserved)

Frontend (Photo-Addon)

• Basic photo grid view
• Date grouping by EXIF capture date
• Infinite scroll (backwards in time)
• Lightbox viewer with EXIF panel
• Camera info display (make, model, aperture, ISO, etc.)
• GPS coordinates with "View on Map" link
• WebDAV Search API integration (replaced folder traversal)
• Date-filtered search queries (3-month initial load)
• EXIF toggle respects search query mode
• Stack view: Arrow positioning fixed
• Stack view: Swipe gesture navigation
• Stack view: Touch responsiveness improvements
• UI cleanup: Removed EXIF indicator icon
• UI cleanup: Removed MDATE indicator icon
• Lightbox: Display photo folder path
• Context menu: Download, Open in Files, Copy Link, Delete
• Map view: Full implementation with Leaflet.js
• Map view: Tile gap CSS fix
• Header bar z-index fix
• "Open in Files" link in lightbox
• Pinch-to-zoom calendar groupings (Day/Week/Month/Year views)
• GPS-based stack merging (location + time grouping)
• Lightbox: Simplified date display with EXIF/Upload source badge

Performance Optimizations (Jan 2026)

• Reduced thumbnail data transfer by 95% (25.8MB → 1.4MB)
• Improved search response time by 83% (4s → 126ms)
• Decreased total XHR data by 93%
• Initial load now fetches 3 months instead of all 5,000+ photos

Community

• Web-extensions proposal submitted to owncloud/web-extensions