Reversing the Photo Stream · Release Candidate 4

The background has been this thread which touches an issue that we also noticed in the past, but ignored so far, because the way the photo stream worked until now was based on good reasons and making any changes to it would have negative impacts: The photo stream can often look rather fragmented in libraries that contain snapshots and random pictures. The reason for this is that individual photos are grouped by day in the default sorting mode. Especially for private photo libraries, each group or “paragraph” would then often contain only a handful of photos, leaving a lot horizontal space unused.

Now the obvious solution to this would be to use a coarser grouping or no grouping at all. However, there is a catch in the photo stream. Traditionally, the latest photos would come first and scrolling down would go backwards in time. This is in contrast to the usual reading direction, but was necessary for the photo stream header to be at its full size while still allowing it to collapse once the view gets scrolled down, saving screen real-estate for the actual photos.

However, to make up for the descending order, photos within each paragraph were ordered ascending in time. Although this meant that there was a jump backwards in time at the end of each paragraph when going through the photos, this wasn't particularly noticeable due to the short time span of one day. But as soon as the time span gets increased to a week or a month, these jumps will start to become really confusing. So in summary, coarser grouping and this special ordering simply isn't compatible.

To fix this, the order had to be reversed. Because the initial scroll position would then be at the bottom instead of the top, this meant that the collapsible header unfortunately had to be sacrificed. On the other hand, this would solve another request we got — keeping the library statistics visible while scrolling through the photo stream.

In the end, since the photo stream header is not very tall anyway, the lost space is rather minimal, so we decided that this would overall be the better approach, also considering that it would be consistent in this regards with events. Individual photos will now be grouped by month, which seems to work pretty well for most photo distributions.

As with the previous release candidates, we have also fixed reported crashes and some other issues that came up. The full list of changes for RC-4 can be found in the change log.