Explicitly providing alternative versions of a file

[steilerDev]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm the maintainer of icloud-photos-sync, which synchronizes the iCloud photo library to the file system and I've been looking for a web interface to then access this library. This project is perfect for this and an initial setup earlier today seems to be working great!

The iCloud backend already does the heavy lifting of providing alternative resolutions and also has the support for non-destructive edits (there is a master file and an edited file). But there are also Live Photos (which is a jpg still version of the picture as well as a mov file for the video).

I can see that photoview automatically generates thumbnails and lower resolution files - is there a way to explicitly provide those versions (by e.g. postfixing them in a specific way?)

Describe the solution you'd like
Use a defined file system structure to not generate duplicates and also combine edits and alternative version support in a single asset on the UI.

[kkovaletp]

I don't see a straightforward way to implement this use case. However, you might want to store all the alternatives for the same media in 1 folder on some albums hierarchy. Then Photoview will scan your media library and create the same hierarchy of albums, as folders in your FS, so you'll have stacks of different media as albums of alternatives, being part of a higher level albums.

To not create thumbnails and use lower-resolution alternatives instead, you might want to look into the #929. I'm not sure that this is the right way for you, but assume that once it gets merged, you'll be able to develop your own media processing executable, which then you can register in Photoview, so it will do the job of providing those alternatives to Photoview instead of the default Darktable.