[feature request] Bulk image compression

[Cris-Edmundson]

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

I have a lot of old pictures that I don't necessarily need in high quality, but that I still want to keep, many of which take up tons of space

Describe the solution you'd like
A clear and concise description of what you want to happen.

I'd love a feature that lets you: search photos and videos over a certain size threshold, and/or within a certain date range, select them either individually or with a select all button, input how much you want to compress the quality of the files and then compress everything selected by that amount and replace the original files with the new compressed ones

Describe alternatives you've considered
A clear and concise description of any alternative solutions or features you've considered.

manually compressing individual files is incredibly tedious. The image toolkit app from fdroid is useful for compressing multiple images, but finding the older stuff requires a huge amount of scrolling, and it can't delete the original images after resizing, and requires manual selection. It really isn't meant for managing storage space like SD maid is, it's for editing

Describe why this would be in the interest of all users
Describe why this is not a niche feature, but would be a benefit for the majority of users.

Not everyone stores many photos locally, but people who do are exactly the people who would need a tool like SD maid more than anyone. Although I'm sure this feature would be complex to design and implement, I think it would be extremely useful for people trying to manage their storage usage, which is exactly what SD maid is for.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

if there's any way to store that an image has been resized already and by what amount, either in metadata or the file name, that seems like it would be very helpful in using this feature long term so that users can see what's already been compressed, and by how much, which would be helpful to know before deciding to potentially compress again

Thank you for the incredibly useful app and all the time you've spent on it!

[d4rken]

Not a bad idea, fits within SD Maids scope.

This could be implemented as a new type of SystemCleaner filter that performs the operation. A few month ago i already refactored the SystemCleaner so that the action per filter can be anything and not necessarily "delete". The UI would be minimal maybe a setting for setting a quality slider 🤔
Would fit well with the size/date criteria as that is already build into it.

Or would this require a new type of "tool" 🤔

How do you envision that that user-interface would look like?

[Cris-Edmundson]

Sorry in advance this is ridiculously dense, I'm really bad at being concise 😅

I think ideally it'd be a separate tool- having thought on it some I feel like it'd be really important to be able to flag images for exclusion, since this is a destructive change of important data. (Maybe it'd be good to have a "wrap up" step after compression where the user can swipe through compressed images and undo the change if needed, or restore images? I feel like there being a "recycling can" for this step before full deletion of the originals would also probably be important)

I thought on this a while and I feel like the intuitive option in a vacuum is essentially like a gallery interface with search functionality. The search could either change select all the matching contents, or only show matches (I feel like making it only show matches might be simpler/better ux) but that feels you run the risk of massively ballooning scope really quickly... 😅 like building a gallery app might be a whole project unto itself. Not being a dev I don't have a great perspective of what's practical.

I think at it's simplest the important things to be able to search by would be age threshold (older than a month ago, a year ago, 3 years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years), and size threshold (over X mb, over XX mb, over XXX mb or whatever makes sense). upon reflecting I think it's less important to be able to put in an age range, that feels like it enables mostly very niche use cases and potentially complicates things depending on the approach for the UI

But I do feel like it'd be important to be able to preview and deselect things from the search. And I'm not sure there's any good way to do that without being able to scroll down a list of options and visually see: "oh, that one is important! lemme de-select these...", and that interface would essentially be a gallery

If it's not hugely beyond scope I'd probably think of a gallery style interface, with a menu bar on the bottom for inputting your two search criteria likely as listboxes, a "search" button to update the view according to the criteria, and then you could deselect items. It'd probably be smart to show the size of each image on it's thumbnail, and allow people to pull up the image in larger scale, maybe with a long press to expand, and short press to toggle selection of that image?

A "select all" button would be nice for toggling the selection of all items so you can either select individual items or de-select individual items. And then you'd need the button for finalizing your selection. I feel like it might be best to put these at the top so they're out of the way and not easy to press accidentally.

Once you've hit finalize maybe a screen with some photo previews and a slider bar for adjusting quality by percentage

This is all waaay complicated compared to just a slider and it all happens invisibly, but that does feel like an extremely minimal set of controls for destructive changes to potentially really important files

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I made some like partial mockups in the process of figuring out my thoughts- if that seems like it'd be potentially helpful at some point in this process lemme know, but I didnt wanna just dump a bunch of visuals of what I feel like I'd do or whatever unless it seemed helpful to do so