Fix sharing of hidden albums

[ajsteele]

If I share a hidden album with someone, it appears in their shared albums, unhidden. In fact, even worse, it’s not possible to hide shared albums so the recipient can’t do this manually if they notice the issue!

This is obviously very much not desired behaviour for potentially sensitive images so it would be great if it did the expected thing and it was possible to hide shared albums, and hidden albums were automatically shared hidden.

[vishnukvmd]

Hey, sorry about this!

Automatically hiding such albums on the receiver's device could cause confusion, and you'd have to communicate out of band to let them know where to find these items.

But we should definitely add an option for the receiver to hide shared albums at their end, so that they've an option to lock away sensitive items. For now, could you please use "Archive" option? This will not lock these items, but will hide them from the home gallery.

In the meanwhile, we'll figure out how we can prioritize the former. Thanks for the feedback!

[vishnukvmd]

There is this corner case of me not wanting a receiver to know that I've hidden a particular album.

Now this could be an awkward bit of information to communicate, depending on the intent with which the album was hidden (noisy vs. sensitive vs. a use case we haven't yet thought of).

There is no perfect answer, but just clarifying why we're currently leaning towards scoping "hidden" to a user, rather than making it a public property of an album :)

[ajsteele]

Could the best solution be a checkbox/slider when you share saying ‘also hide this album for recipient’? I guess I’d default to ‘yes’, but depending on how you weight the corner-case you might disagree! I think there might well be cases where people would want to be able to set this independently though, so scoping to user does make sense.

[mnvr]

IMO the real issue here is this:

it’s not possible to hide shared albums so the recipient can’t do this manually if they notice the issue

There isn't any other issue (again, IMO). If I share an album with someone then they should not be privy to the fact if I have archived / hidden that album. But yes, they should be able to hide it on their own. My point being, I don't think we need new toggles etc, we just need to support hiding of shared albums.

[ajsteele]

I think the only issue is that they might want it to be hidden and you might not care that they know, eg if it’s some joint private photos. It would be nice if this could be done seamlessly by allowing the sender to pre-hide or -archive the album.

btw we tried it and you don’t seem to be able to archive shared albums either!

[mnvr]

We understand about the use case you're describing, but we feel it is a use case tackled separately. Something like "partner sharing" or a slightly more generic variant of that, where both parties trust each other and to share and organize full library collectively. We do want to solve that use case too, but not by mixing it with the regular sharing flows, because 1. it'll complicate all the regular sharing flows, and 2. it'll still be inconvenient for folks who want partner sharing because each time they share they'll have to go to some advanced options or whatnot and toggle a couple of switches.

I don't know the final form partner sharing will take, and when we'll get around to it, but I just wanted to tell you folks in the team have been thinking about it for long and do want to tackle these cases (since many of us also want something similar for our own use!)

you don’t seem to be able to archive shared albums either!

That too is an infelicity we'll fix, same as being able to hide shared albums.