Media on URL

[Mark Stiebel]

As I've been focusing more on my photography and starting to dabble with 
video on my dives, I've started to play with the media withing 
Subsurface a bit more. A couple of observations, that may turn into bug 
fixes and possibly features.. (excuse this email, it may turn into an 
incoherent thought dump!)

First off, I'm trying to streamline my workflow with making images 
available on the net. So instead of adding images from a local folder, 
tried for the first time to upload them to a webserver  (in my case onto 
an AWS S3 bucket with Cloudfront to serve them). It is a tad painful to 
add the images singularly. So a few thoughts I had around this, in 
varying degrees of feasibility (both usability and aligning with 
subsurface design/dev/portability philosophy)

I've downloaded and built subsurface, but not yet made any significant 
contributions. I'm not making any feature requests here, but more 
throwing ideas around, seeing if anyone has thought about it before, and 
whether if I take any of this on board if its going benefit other users 
and/or the project as a whole.

I appreciate there is a little to no appetite for hosting media on the 
subsurface cloud servers, which is understandable. So what about making 
it a bit easier for self-hosting media - also appreciating the 
complexities of the sheer number of technologies, platforms and 
environments available.
For my case it would be great to integrate S3 as a media repository - 
but I don't agree with the philosophy of tight technology integration. 
Where does it stop?

So instead..

- Ability to add multiple URLs before hitting the import button - avoids 
the time sync dialog for every image

- Dialog text is misleading. Both right-click menu and file input dialog 
imply you can add multiple images via URL.

- Ways to bulk add images from a URL?
     - import a text file with multiple image URLS to import as a batch?
     - parse a directory listing HTML file from base URL to do same?
     - command line option or tool to adding images to a dive from the 
command line?

- Image viewer for remote images appears to be broken. Thumbnails in the 
media tab and on the dive profile work, but double clicking doesn't 
appear to retrieve the file properly from the server (will need to dig 
further into this one)

- Mobile app doesn't show media. Makes sense for local media, but would 
be good to be able to show media if its stored on a publicly accessible 
URL

- Printing. Currently this doesn't appear to support images. Is it 
something that's never been a consideration, or something that's in the 
not worth the effort bucket?

- Maybe I just need to rethink my workflow, and instead look at 
exporting dives to HTML - and customising the HTML to my needs. Is it 
worthwhile templating the HTML export like the print template is?
    - Command line option / tool to trigger an export?
    - Or do I just read the XML divelog, and parse it myself to automate 
any static HTML generation and uploading to a hosting site?

- What about video? Is it a consideration to somehow support videos 
hosted on the common video hosting sites? (YouTube, Vimeo?)

.. and there was my hopefully at least somewhat coherent thought dump.

Cheers,
Mark.

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