When I share multiple file at once with my contacts,
I would like to see those thumbnails grouped, so it is clear that those were sent in a single message.
This is a default behaviour in the majority of the messaging apps.
Images/videos are displayed individually, making users feeling that those were sent in individual messages.
it is annoying as the chat becomes huge, it increases the scrolling and messages can be lost in the middle.
When I see feature requests like this one, I already know it’s going to be a really complex task. Yeah, the feature itself would be awesome — for example, grouping media by time if there’s only a 2–5 minute gap between them. But I think the current focus is on improving the experimental features, so maybe in about a year or so. 
I can imagine this would be a quite complex request, but it is still important to document it. As final user, I want to have a nice experience while chatting with my friends… above all if I am migrating from any other mainstream app… above all if I am trying to convince other “less motivated” people to migrate to DC. Thanks!
this is needed to be on the level and expectations of mainstream users, but yeah quite some work needs to be done in all platforms where DC is available
and in general there is the bigger problem of attachment size limitation in Delta Chat, people can’t send anything bigger than ~20mb, which is one of the blockers for adoption and migration from other mainstream apps
Hi @adbenitez ,
Yes, I understand the complexity and the technical limits of email attachments.
A final user cannot understand the challenge that happened “behind the scenes”… so, maybe it could just be a front end “trick” where:
Basically, like an “accordion component” that expand/collapse.
This seems to be aligned with also what @DELTA_MAFIA was mentioning… ?
Thanks!
as said, my point was that adding such changes to the UI in all platforms is not trivial, the point about attachment size limitation is on top of that, there is all kind of tricks and things that can be done, ex. send a meta-data email containing pointers to other emails/images that are part of the batch of images etc.
we will be introducing some “message metadata preview” for big attachments that already goes in that direction, so eventually conditions might be ready for such multi-image gallery message
In theory, it’s possible to implement an algorithm in the client that analyzes the attachment size before sending. If it’s larger than, say, 20 MB, the client could split it into 10 MB chunks, send them as separate emails, and mark the headers so this can be recognized.
On the recipient’s side, the client would analyze the headers, wait for all parts to arrive, then reassemble the file from the received chunks and display it in the chat. A similar approach exists in the Share.xdc app, though it only works with small files that could be sent normally anyway.
related: Multiple images in one message
