[Photos Desktop] large-files missing download button(missing onDownload callback)

[ahxxm]

Description

Background: I'd like to ffmpeg some mobile phone recorded videos with unnecessarily high bitrates, I found that Photos Desktop doesn't show a download button there, unlike when browsing photos.

So I found this code pointer which omits the callback, presumably causing button disappear, along with some imports that might be useful

import { downloadAndSaveFiles } from "ente-gallery/services/save";
import { fileFileName } from "ente-media/file-metadata";
import { DownloadStatusNotifications } from "components/DownloadStatusNotifications";

Version

v1.7.18

What product are you using?

Ente Photos

What platform are you using?

Desktop - Windows

[simbabimba-dev]

at line 185 FileViewer is not receiving an onDownload callback

[simbabimba-dev]

i mean it does say that large files is read-only so its highly likely that this wont be fixed

[ahxxm]

I believe it's more like unintended/leftover, as on mobile app I can download large photos, so I reported this as a bug

[AswinAsok]

Hi @ahxxm,

Thanks for the feedback! A bit of context on those points:

Empty function: This was intentional the onVisualFeedback is only used in the gallery to acknowledge actions like keyboard shortcuts. It's unrelated to the download button.

Download button: The Large Files feature is primarily for freeing up space (i.e., deleting files), so download wasn't an obvious choice.

But I think I understand your use case now. you want to download large files, compress them with ffmpeg, and re-upload?
I'll look into adding this if the implementation is straightforward.

Also as a workaround: if you have the Ente Photos mobile app, you can move files into an album directly from Large Files, then use the desktop/web client to download and process them.

[ahxxm]

Thanks for the workaround, I followed it and re-compressed a few videos taken by phone, size reduced to 10%~20% using default libx265 params and profile, the compressed video has VMAF>93.

Side note for <10MB but still larger-than-necessary files, for example, some "advanced" mobile system produces 3MB~5MB PNG screenshots. These can be found using the Chromium indexedDB in dev console:

Use with caution!

const db = await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    const req = indexedDB.open("ente-files");
    req.onsuccess = () => resolve(req.result);
    req.onerror = () => reject(req.error);
});
const files = await new Promise(r => {
    const req = db.transaction("files").objectStore("files").get("files");
    req.onsuccess = () => r(req.result);
});
db.close();

files.filter(f => {
    const name = (f.metadata?.title || "").toLowerCase();
    if (!name.endsWith(".png") && !name.endsWith(".jpg") && !name.endsWith(".jpeg")) return false;
    const size = f.info?.fileSize || 0;
    return (name.startsWith("img") || name.includes("screenshot")) && size > 2 * 1024 * 1024;
}).sort((a, b) => (b.info?.fileSize || 0) - (a.info?.fileSize || 0))
.map(f => ({ id: f.id, name: f.metadata?.title, mb: (f.info?.fileSize / 1048576).toFixed(1) }))