Feature Ideas

Introduction

There are many features that one can think of for MediaGoblin. Some should be implemented really soon, because they are needed right now. Other features would be nice to have, but are currently really hard to implement. And finally there are the Feature Ideas that can be classified as "brain storming".

This wiki page is mostly for long term feature ideas. This specifically means there are no promises that anything listed here will ever happen. It means nobody is currently working on this feature.

If you have an idea for a new feature, that is not listed here or in the Bug Tracker, please talk to some developers, or add it below in the "Yet Unsorted Ideas" section. If you really think, that your idea is extremely important and needs to be acted upon soon, you could file a bug.

The List

If there is a bug (closed or open), please link to it.

Access Control

• Renaming of an account
  • by its user
  • by an admin
• Account creation / activation, considering e-mail address
  • Expire inactive accounts
  • A method of account activation: ask the user to send e-mail message with a specified text from the address they entered, instead of GMG sending a message to that address (which could be somebody else’s).
    • What about faked addresses? If that’s a serious problem for this, could it still be a requirement? Or is it so serious that it would bother malicious misusers least of all people? --Aleksejrs 15:17, 7 December 2011 (EST)
  • The above allows accepting multiple inactive accounts for the same e-mail address without bothering its owner and without making it difficult for him to register.
    • But accounts could have the same name… --Aleksejrs 15:14, 7 December 2011 (EST)
• An account may constitute a part of user's identity, one may want to prohibit creation of a new account with the same name/id by a different person. --Aleksejrs (talk) 09:11, 18 August 2013 (EDT)

Design (UI / HTML)

• Point and click theme options: Colors, layout, typefaces, size, thumbnail options, etc.
  • Simple settable options to "personalize" the instance without fiddling with templates.
• Responsive base theme
• User Avatar (#499)

Extensions

• A link to the page about installed (and not installed?) plugins.

Federation

• Two federation ideas

Import/Export

• flickr Import ( ≈ The user has the possibility to make backup of your content that can be migrated to another instance of mediagoblin)

• MediaWiki export
• digiKam plugin (export to mediagoblin)
• Mount GMG as a file system (e.g. FUSE)
• #600: "Liberate my data" (data export button)
• #398 wontfixed at some early point

Licensing

• (FIXED) Help the site admin comply with the AGPL.
• (FIXED) Creative Commons choice on user profile. E.g. default license choice for media uploaded by that user.
• “Other (please specify: [ ])” license as an alternative to “All rights reserved”.

Media Processing

• Retry media processing
  • Related: rotating images that have no proper Orientation tags.

Media Types

• For non-still-images:
  • Duration
  • Bitrate
  • Format structure (e.g. “Ogg/Theora+Vorbis”)
  • Permit pre-encoded uploads to eliminate server-side processing (available as of 0.3.3)
  • Support Ogg/Theora player (already implemented?)
  • Subtitles for video and audio
• A way to find out what formats can be uploaded.
  • E.g.: A simple type list near the upload field.
• For images with transparency, let the uploader specify background (e.g. color or checkerboard). #482 (background color) wontfix'ed in the past.

Metadata

• Ability to write metadata (comments, tags, etc.) to files.
• Copy (some) metadata from the full‐size image into the smaller versions. If possible (according to metadata formats), add a note to them that they are not exactly the original.
  • #94: exif data handling for users (about privacy)
  • #284: Support "Orientation" EXIF tag (fixed)
  • EXIF info?
• Display more info about the file on its page
  • Resolution of the original
  • File size of the original
  • Resolution of the scaled-down version
• "trans-tagging": Adding tags to other peoples media #251
  • Many images usecase#Crowd tagging/captioning/commenting
• Geotagging support.
  • Both read and write.
  • Display on OpenStreetMap.
• Consider Semantic Web
  • Microformats, RDFa, Microdata
  • Consider the privacy implications when choosing what to mark up.
• Add hashes etc, something like magnet links or Metalink, of the files. The information can then be used for downloading, searching, linking to.
  • Maybe also optional for privacy.
  • Say, a server is loaded a lot, or is short on traffic, so it asks that the visitor use something like Miro to watch the video while/by downloading it via BitTorrent (there is also web seeding, so it may be not a problem if the BitTorrent download doesn't work while the GMG does).

Security

• DONE: CSRF (#76)
• X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

  Served pages have the content-type set. And the browser should not be allowed to guess a different type. See: Firefox bug #471020

• "Content Security Policy" (CSP) might really be a good add on to have. Noone should rely solely on this, but it might make things a lot safer if other security guards fail.

  A simple allow 'self' might already get a lot of things better.

  Link1 Link2

• Possibly disallowing pages to be shown in frames.

Unsorted Ideas

Put your new ideas here:

• Search.
• Related Content
• Generate pages dynamically using files on the file system.
• Like the UI of an ordinary image viewer (e.g. geeqie) or a file manager generates thumbnails (optionally saving them), shows metadata…
• MediaWiki can generate thumbnails of arbitrary size on demand. (hopefully not arbitrarily large?)
• Categorize media as videos, images and audio, put media of each type in a row of the grid
• Offer random image/video/audio option
• Integration with Diaspora
• Facilitate viewing at different resolutions ( quality )
• Icons of software used in the footer with description of what it was used for appearing as popup on hover