Ability to collapse/hide image thumbnails ad hoc or in bulk

[williamkray]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

I would like the ability to collapse image thumbnails individually, or all image thumbnails visible in the window at once using a slash-command like /collapse

Why would you like to do it?

Most of the time, I prefer to have image thumbnails rendered for visibility, but sometimes someone may share content that is distracting, inappropriate for the current environment (NSFW), etc. In these situations, the only options are to disable all thumbnail rendering throughout the application, or delete the offending image (only an option if I happen to be an administrator of the room, and not always an appropriate response).

There are also some times when lots of images are uploaded in succession, and it would be nice to temporarily shrink the amount of space that they take up to see the surrounding contextual conversation without needing to see the thumbnails. Again, this should not require changing the applications settings back and forth, which is clunky.

This has been a feature of Slack for a very long time.

How would you like to achieve it?

Similarly to how Slack achieves it: each thumbnail should include an arrow next to it, and clicking this arrow would collapse/expand the image thumbnail. Similarly, the/collapse command could be used to toggle to "collapsed" all image thumbnails in recent memory in that room.

Have you considered any alternatives?

Disabling the application settings to "Show previews/thumbnails for images", but this has a few major failures at solving the above problems:

• only prevents the image from rendering, but still takes up quite a bit of space with a placeholder
• is application wide, which does not fit the above situations
• if used, once an image is clicked to show it, you cannot hide it again without clearing the app cache and refreshing the app

Additional context

This issue was opened in response to PR 4349 being closed and not added to the codebase. It refers to the alternative solutions suggested in that conversation.

[grimhilt]

Concerning the particular case where there are a lot of successive uploads, I personally like the WhatsApp way which is to regroup everything in one "message".

(here are 6 times the same picture)

[t3chguy]

@grimhilt that's element-hq/element-meta#754

[andybalaam]

I disable "Show previews/thumbnails for images" to protect against inappropriate images appearing in my timeline.

This means that each image appears as a grey rectangle with a "Show image" link to display it.

I would really like to be able to undo the "Show image" action, if I mistakenly reveal an inappropriate image. This feels like a good safety feature to have.

This issue would provide that ability, if I understand correctly. So I'd really like it as a feature.

[Half-Shot]

@williamkray there is now the ability to hide any media individually by pressing the hide button, does that help your use case?

[williamkray]

@Half-Shot it addresses only some of the criteria that my requested feature covers:

✅ hide inappropriate images without needing to be a room admin
✅ action is reversible without needing to change app settings or clear cache
❌ shrink amount of space used by hidden images to allow viewing more context messages
❌ bulk hide of all recent/visible images

i'm not really sure why leaving large place-holders is the UX chosen in element when hiding images, but i'm not on the design team.

take the following use case: conversation prompts a member of a room to post a message saying they recently went on a trip through europe, detailing where they went, their itinerary, etc. they then post several pictures from their trip, each picture of course being a different matrix event in the room and taking up significant space.

these thumbnails push their original message up out of view, and i have to scroll all the way to the top to find their message about where they went or why they are posting these pictures, or any contextual reason why they decided to share this information now. perhaps these pictures are a mix of appropriate and NSFW content that wouldn't be ideal to have on screen... yes, this feature allows me to hide individual pictures by turning them into a big gray box, but does not address the fact that i really don't want to look at any of this wall of pictures right now, i just want to read their message and maybe choose to look at those pictures later when it's more appropriate.

for this use case, i would like a quick command to collapse all images in recent history, thus shrinking the amount of space used for all this stuff i'm not currently interested in, and thus dropping their textual message into view easily. at that point, i could potentially decide specific images to un-collapse, perhapse based on their filename (i am interested in seeing pont_neuf.png based on their description of their trip and my current surroundings, but i would prefer not to uncollapse red_light_district_ams.jpg at the moment).

hopefully this example sheds light on why the current implementation is still unsatisfactory of the criteria of my feature request.

[Half-Shot]

Ah okay, that's useful context. So for more context the reason we have the larger placeholders is to avoid the timeline structure moving around on unhide which is a design goal. I suppose there could be users that like this to happen though.

My feeling for your specific use case might be served by matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#4274 (and it's eventual implementation) where the sender sends many pictures as a single event (or at least appears as a single block). It would still take up room, but not an obnoxious amount.

But it's interesting to hear of an entirely different use case for the inappropriate media one we've been tracking, where you want to actually view the images but in your own time.

[williamkray]

an alternative example might be a "dank memes" room, where a significant portion of the posts from multiple people are images, but if i'm at work maybe i just want to view that channel easily to keep up with the small banter between images and choose to temporarily view one at a time based on those comments.

in this case, extensible messages with multiple images will not work, because the messages are not from the same event, but multiple users sending unique events.