Improve phone switch / factory reset

[0verEngineer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I have factory wiped my phone and pointed lespas to its directory in nextcloud but it does not show the camera roll photos that are in the lespas directory in nextcloud. But it syncs new files into the same directory.
The same problem applies to the pictures directory and this also means i am not able to re-download the camera roll or the pictures directory on the wiped phone.

Describe the solution you'd like
I can think of 2 possible ways:

1. Just use the present data from the camera roll and pictures directory in nextcloud and show it in the app + allow download.

2. Rename the present directories in nextcloud and show them in the app as own directories + allow download. But to allow the download in this case the user should have the option to either merge the directories (old camera roll into new one, pictures into picturea) or to put them in a new directory in pictures (something like 'Camera Roll - Phone Name 01')

Describe alternatives you've considered
Download the files with the nextcloud app and move them into the correct dirs on the phone manually

Additional context

• I have wiped the phone, so my backup directory names are the same, i do not know how this works with a different phone but in this case the user should also be able to somehow get all the photos back on the phone or in the lespas app as easy as possible

[scubajeff]

Being able to download some portions of the archive is something new. It's somewhat against the basic design principle of Les Pas, which sees the camera roll as a raw material warehouse for building albums. So at the core, only albums get the full two way sync.

[0verEngineer]

No offense, but i would argue it is not a design principle that you cannot restore a backup (not even showing it as a album) it is a design flaw.
A lot of people do not create any albums, they just have the camera roll, and switching to a new phone on android is already painful enough without the need to migrate the lespas directories because it is designed in this way.
Switching to a new phone is something that should be trivial, because a lot of people get new phones every 2 years.

The current setup leads to following problems:

• I have reset the phone, how do i restore camera roll? -> If i copy it to the phone, will lespas duplicate them in the nextcloud?
• Lespas creates a directory structure like: /DCIM//Camera and uploads the camera roll in there...
  • what happens if i have 2 phones with the same name?
  • if i reset the phone and setup lespas and create new photos, they will just end in the same directory but the already existing ones are not shown in the app and not downloadable

[scubajeff]

Not sure about this. If you don't like playing with albums, why choose Les Pas at the first place? Nextcloud android client can do the job.

[0verEngineer]

I did not say that i do not use albums, and that is not even relevant for this issue. I described it very clear that there are multiple problems with how the app works at the moment.
I just think you are out of touch with the userbase here, the setup of a new phone is absolute unclear.

My solution to the new phone setup was to disable lespas backup, manually copy the camera roll back to the phone, delete the backup in nextcloud (just in case) and let it re-sync. If you think this is an acceptable solution for such an app then feel free to close this issue, but i think the optimum way would be an apple-like solution.

[scubajeff]

Les Pas is built around the idea of album, almost all the features are useful only if the picture has been added in an album. Camera roll or the coming Gallery function is there only to provide user a more integrated way of finding interesting ones and adding them to Les Pas. I really don't like the idea of using Camera roll only, that will obviously make my effort and time wasted. Therefore, features which encourage such use case are out of question, and restoring camera roll from server archive is unfortunately one of them. 2-way sync remains for albums only.

However, I'm also doing some planning for features around archive on server. Latest version already support searching for object and location in archive without downloading at all. More things might come.