Picture based tiddlers

[chicah doda]

Hi all

I'm interested in using TW5 for my daily note taking. I very often takes notes with images. Sometimes the image is the only note.

Picture taking should be well integrated.

Is TW5 well suited for this task?

Are there plugins for quick picture taking?

How well would performance be with several hundred pictures?

Thank you for your answer in advance.

[Eric Shulman]

On Saturday, July 31, 2021 at 2:58:05 AM UTC-7 e.arnol...@gmail.com wrote:

I'm interested in using TW5 for my daily note taking. I very often takes notes with images. Sometimes the image is the only note.

Picture taking should be well integrated.

Are there plugins for quick picture taking?

Even without a plugin, it turns out that you can take a picture and store it as a tiddler (assuming, of course, that you are using TiddlyWiki on a device that has a camera; i.e., a phone or tablet.  For my test, I used a Samsung Android phone.

1) Open your TiddlyWiki in the phone's browser (I used Chrome)

2) From the sidebar "Tools" tab, click on the "Import" button

3) The phone then prompts for you to select from: "Camera", "Camera (camcorder)", or "Files"

4) I selected "Camera" and the device's camera interface started

5) I took a picture and the the device then prompted for "retry" or "ok"... I selected "ok"

6) TiddlyWiki's standard $:/Import tiddler was displayed, listing one .jpg file to import (with a very long number as the filename!)

7) Press the import button... a tiddler is created.

Note that this also works if you select "Camera (camcorder)" in step (3), and it actually imports a video into the TiddlyWiki!

Of course, there are ways to streamline this process.  For example, you could add the Tools "Import" button directly to the sidebar so it is more readily available without having to select the "Tools" tab first.

I've also written a little (unpublished) plugin that defines an $action-importfile widget that you can trigger from any $button, and bypasses the $:/Import tiddler to directly create a tiddler with less interactive steps.

How well would performance be with several hundred pictures?

Storing lots of large pictures within TiddlyWiki can slow things down quite a bit (especially the file load time!).  Ideally, we'd want a way to take a picture and store it externally without storing the image data directly in a tiddler.  That should also be "do-able", but will probably require another little plugin to make the process as streamlined as possible.

-e

[TiddlyTweeter]

VERY interesting post.

TW is well suited for it with a bit of tweaking ... 

Much of the issue is how you have your OS setup??? I do screen capture vis OS on Android, Chromebook and PC desktop no problem.

And then import.

WHERE TW gets interesting to me in the OP is engaging PEN input into the editor or into image tiddlers after capture.

ALL I do is scale the box full screen --- as for pen accuracy, you need a decent sized canvas.

Ask if you want particulars.

Best

TT 

[Mark S.]

TW isn't really suited for dealing with photos on a regular basis.

The problem is that even a single high-res photo will bog down your TW experience, especially saving and loading. Which means you need to externalized your images. Externalizing your images means exporting your images to some place accessible by TW, and then re-importing as URLs. There isn't any smooth, automated way to do all this. I've been looking and experimenting for awhile, but with only mixed results. The ideal solution wouldn't require a user to do more than click on an "archive" button to convert a tiddler to an external image. And I guess there would need to be a reverse button, since AFAIK you can only draw on an embedded image. 

[Mat]

> I'm interested in using TW5 for my daily note taking. I very often takes notes with images. Sometimes the image is the only note.

Addressing this specific bit, i.e taking notes by mixing text and, presumably, "scribbled images" I would say TW is not ideal. I really wish it were, and I'll outline an idea below. Now, there is a built-in tool for drawing but it is somewhat crude and the tiddler is then of a special type, so it has to be a separate image i.e not the same as the one you type in. So it is not like scribbling notes with paper+pen. Out of curiosity; how would you actually draw the images as you take notes? Do you have special hardware? Because a regular laptop or mobile device is of course not ideal for the precision that arbitrary drawings usually need.

With that said, here's a hypothetical solution. Some years back, I made an experiment with overlaying/drawing on top of images in TW which has similarities to the following:

Fellow tiddleur Saq recently created Streams. It lets you create multiple tiddlers from the current one in a very seamless way, so that the created content is transcluded into the current one. So you don't leave the current tiddler. I would think Streams can be tweaked so that the use can select tiddler type for the note so to intersperse notes and drawings (and other content). If one wants overlapping content, as opposed to distinct subsequent sections of texts and notes, then I would also think that the display of the transclusions could be styled to overlap (and top one has a transparent background) so that you could, for example, encircle a word or draw an arrow from mid sentence to point to a subsequent image (that is not overlapping), etc. AFAICT this is doable and least in theory.

<:-)

[Finn Lancaster]

Great Ideas so far. From a developer standpoint, I can recommend the Imgur API for integration. Not only does it give flexibility and a high number of photo uploads per day, but it is also relatively easy to use and combine with existing technologies (ie tiddlywiki in this case.) 

I would love to build a JS plug-in or tool for TW with this, if any of you are interested. 

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[ludwa6]

+1 the Imgur idea- my goto site for image hosting.  Easy upload via mobile, easy to link your choice of output formats… And a RESTful API that should be easy enough to integrate, right?  If it’s beta testers you want, count me in!

/walt

[Joshua Fontany]

There is work in progress to handle a "file upload plugin" that can be used with various backends (Node.js TW, and TiddlyWiki-onFission being the first 2).

Discussion thread here: https://talk.fission.codes/t/tiddlywiki-file-upload-plugin-webnative-ipfs-funded/1926

Best,
Joshua Fontany

[makiaea]

i don't use this myself but it is possible on ios using quine2 (may require the "scriptable" app)

one caveat is i can't get the image to show changes straight away in tiddlywiki without saving/reloading the file in quine2. maybe someone has an appropriate suggestion? i tried soren's link in a recent discussion for refresh but didn't try eric's solution in the same thread

ok, so how it works:

you can make a tiddlywiki macro to insert the following based on the file location of the photo (or use a pythonista script etc., you can use anything that's appropriate e.g. gladys or another clipboard manager on ios)

show photo using (this is a relative path on the ios filesysten, relative to the open tiddlywiki) :

[img[photo/20181028 maki know abcd 2.jpg]]

link to edit this photo (assuming it lives in iCloud, using full path):

[ext[shareddocuments:///private/var/mobile/Library/Mobile%20Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/books/00045/20201205makiaea-anwiki/photo/20181028%20maki%20know%20abcd%202.jpg]]

(opens in ios using files, can use apple pencil but only additively, remember to save using "done", note the conversion of spaces, which is why i would use pythonista as i know how to work the conversion, you could also use shortcuts as in the macstories source linked below, or just manually replace the spaces to start with, which is what i did for this example)

again, note that i had to save and reload tiddlywiki in my setup (quine2) after editing the photo to show the updated photo within tiddlywiki, if you have a different setup ymmv.

warmest wishes, maki

source: https://www.macstories.net/ios/fs-bookmarks-a-shortcut-to-reopen-files-and-folders-directly-in-the-files-app/

the shiraz plugin has some nice macros to format images

[Saq Imtiaz]

Great Ideas so far. From a developer standpoint, I can recommend the Imgur API for integration. Not only does it give flexibility and a high number of photo uploads per day, but it is also relatively easy to use and combine with existing technologies (ie tiddlywiki in this case.) 

I would love to build a JS plug-in or tool for TW with this, if any of you are interested. 

As Joshua mentioned, there is a file uploads plugin in development that supports different uploader modules to support storage backends:

https://github.com/saqimtiaz/tiddlywiki-on-fission/tree/main/upload-files-wiki/plugins/file-uploads

 Writing an Imgur uploader module would indeed be interesting.  The tricky bits to figure out would be CORS and authentication. If that is something you are interested in working on, I would be happy to discuss further. 

Regards,

Saq

[TW Tones]

Saq,

I would be keen to support project with a donation but I must say I am not sure exactly what they aim to achieve and how what is built will work, even if I would have the skills to make use of the final result. What does fission offer in the end etc...

This is made more complex because to achieve what is outlined I could read between the line and imagine for example tiddlywiki could save a file after generating it, allowing feedback, submissions and shared TiddlyWiki etc... but I am not sure if this will be the case.

There remains a barrier to my understanding because most of the details seem to make sense to "those in the know." 

Regards

Tones

[Mark S.]

On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:48:10 PM UTC-7 TW Tones wrote:

Saq,

There remains a barrier to my understanding because most of the details seem to make sense to "those in the know." 

Yes! Atom. Electron. Fission. IPFS.  It's taken for granted that everyone knows what this means and what the implications are. 

In terms of single-file solutions, exporting via the zip plugin seems to be the only practicable solution. On Android, a Tiddloid-like app could upload to imgur or some place. However I wonder about the authentication. I downloaded an Android app for uploading to that has thousands of users and was surprised that there was no way to connect to your personal imgur account. This means all posts will be public, none can go to your paid account, and that you can't manage them over time.   

 

[ludwa6]

Can't say much as to how this works technically, but as a naive user of both Imgur and TWOF, i can affirm that:

1. I use Imgur both on web and mobile, to read and post both public and hidden images and albums, and the authentication is perfectly seamless; enter id & pwd once, and it will remember your codes as long as you like (maybe there's a default logout, but i'm in often enough, it seems never have to re-authenticate). Can't speak to the Android issue that @Mark raised, but the iOS app works great for me.
2. As for TiddlyWiki-On-Fission: this too seemed a perfectly seamless experience, when i set up this instance back in March; haven't done much with it since then, as it still carries the not-ready-for-production-use disclaimer, but even now... The way this tech connects your browser's localStorage to the IPFS cloud in such a way that you can totally forget about where the files reside just feels to like magic of the right kind.  Like: this is the way it should work, everywhere.

Yet, there being "no free lunch," i guess there's gotta be a host in there somewhere -and so, w/r/t/ images at least, in terms of both technical and end-user values, TWOF & Imgur look to me like being pretty well-aligned.   By far the lion's share of image-enhanced tiddlers i have created are pulling from Imgur-hosted links already, so if i could upload and/or download to&from there from within TW itself, that would be awesome!  

Is this consistent w/ the vision for TW-on-Fission, i wonder?

/walt

[Mark S.]

On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:21:19 AM UTC-7 ludwa6 wrote:

Can't say much as to how this works technically, but as a naive user of both Imgur and TWOF, i can affirm that:

1. I use Imgur both on web and mobile, to read and post both public and hidden images and albums, and the authentication is perfectly seamless; enter id & pwd once, and it will remember your codes as long as you like (maybe there's a default logout, but i'm in often enough, it seems never have to re-authenticate). Can't speak to the Android issue that @Mark raised, but the iOS app works great for me.
2. 
   

Does the imgur app allow you to take pictures? The only imgur-sponsored app I could find on playstore promised "Imgur: Find funny GIFs, memes & watch viral videos". That's not my interest. Maybe the app does more, but it needs to say so in the description. It goes on for four paragraphs about all the material you'll see. A comment in the reviews says that the ability to post has been broken for a year.

The 3rd party app I did find could load your pictures to imgur but did not use your own imgur account, so there's no telling when your post will be trimmed.

Yes, I'm sure you can use the web based imgur to copy addresses and then copy/paste them into a TW. But it's a several step process and definitely not convenient on a small screen.

The ideal solution would allow you to take an imported image in TW and directly post it to your own imgur account, and then create the corresponding image tiddler.

 

[ludwa6]

On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 5:39:58 PM UTC+1 Mark S. wrote:

...Does the imgur app allow you to take pictures?

Yessir: you click the '+' button at top of screen, select your preferred upload option -from camera (button takes you there), else from your Imgur library or system file-picker- and then you select either "Public" or "Hidden" and upload. Easy as falling off a log!  /w

 

The only imgur-sponsored app I could find on playstore promised "Imgur: Find funny GIFs, memes & watch viral videos". That's not my interest.

Not mine neither! But that is indeed how the app is described and marketed, and that's how they make their money.  In this attention (i.e. ad-funded) economy, there is apparently a very significant market of people who spend significant time watching "funny GIFs, memes & viral videos," and that's what pays the freight on this image hosting.  /w

 

Maybe the app does more, but it needs to say so in the description. It goes on for four paragraphs about all the material you'll see. A comment in the reviews says that the ability to post has been broken for a year.

Hm -dunno about that comment, but the Imgur-licensed app for iOS does exactly what we're talking about here seamlessly, although you do have to ignore all the other crap on the home screen, which is targeted to their mainstream user base, NOT the niche that you and i represent, Mark. We're definitely not alone in this -Imgur has been for a good few years already the goto app for many DIY Maker-types that have a story to tell via series of annotated images (for example check out the Reddit boards that are that way inclined)- but this is not the user base that Imgur gets paid to attract, i suppose, so i wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to change their positioning in App Store or Google Play.  /w

 

Yes, I'm sure you can use the web based imgur to copy addresses and then copy/paste them into a TW. But it's a several step process and definitely not convenient on a small screen. 

The ideal solution would allow you to take an imported image in TW and directly post it to your own imgur account, and then create the corresponding image tiddler.

So long as the .html file (presuming a single-file wiki) need never embed an image file, but is instead just rendering it from online storage (and/or from browser localStorage, in the TWOF scenario?), that is the magic that needs enabling here, seems to me.

/walt

[Mark S.]

On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 10:22:40 AM UTC-7 ludwa6 wrote:

Hm -dunno about that comment, but the Imgur-licensed app for iOS does exactly what we're talking about here seamlessly, although you do have to ignore all the other crap on the home screen, which is targeted to their mainstream user base, NOT the niche that you and i represent,

I'll have to give it a try. I guess if it works, I don't understand why there would even be a 3rd part app. But I digress.

 

So long as the .html file (presuming a single-file wiki) need never embed an image file, but is instead just rendering it from online storage (and/or from browser localStorage, in the TWOF scenario?), that is the magic that needs enabling here, seems to me.

Although that would be nice, it would be OK if the image temporarily resided in the TW.  

Thanks!