Mobile photo import and display

Feature Requests
1

I currently use Mylio. The biggest blocker for me switching to Aspect is an iOS app that (1) imports directly from the camera roll into Aspect and (2) displays the photos in the Aspect library.

Organizing photos, editing, labeling, etc can all be done on my computer. But I want a seamless import for photos taken with my phone (preferably without involving Photos) and display them on my phone.

2

We do have an experimental iOS app that is meant to automatically import photos shot on the phone into the Aspect library. It doesn’t currently display the library contents on the phone, but that is planned, too.

The big issue is that the API that iOS provides for accessing the Apple Photos library isn’t designed for this use case. There are some issues that currently keep the app in an experimental state:

  1. Indexing the photos and reading their metadata requires reading the whole file contents, which makes the process very inefficient
  2. When cloud storage is enabled for the Photos Library and the phone’s storage is full, newly taken photos will be moved to the cloud immediately, which means the app will miss them and will skip the import. This can probably be fixed at the expense of downloading the file from the cloud again.
  3. It is currently necessary to open the app, so that it can start to import new photos and synchronize them with the computer.

Having said that, as long as the phone’s storage has free space left, the app should generally work fine for this particular use case. Fixing those issues as far as possible is on our short-term TODO list, so that we can move the app out of its experimental status as soon as possible.