Feature: Send image from URL

[iwikal]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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Feature Description

I often want to share an image I found online. If I'm to share this image with Signal, I either have to download it first and attach it, or send the link and have the recipient open it in their browser. It would be nice if I could paste the link somewhere and have Signal automatically download and send it in one step.

[harshilparmar]

We can do that by dividing the image upload process into two steps.

1. Check the attached link extension (png, jpeg)
2. if link contains valid image format download image by js and passes it to normal upload functionality
3. it's done
   Correct me if I am wrong !! It is my first approach after seeing this problem

[EvanHahn-Signal]

@harshilparmar That sounds like a good first approach. Some other things to consider:

• Do we want this to instead piggyback on our link preview functionality?
• Are there privacy concerns here? For example, if someone pastes a link, would they expect it to be automatically downloaded by Signal?
• Images can be served without .png or .jpg extensions. For example, https://example.com/logo could be a JPEG, even though its suffix doesn't end in .jpg. How do we want to handle this?
• If the image is corrupted, what do we do?
• If the image fails to download for some reason (due to network issues, for example), what should we do?
• Are there concerns for Signal's servers? Will this dramatically increase the load such that it will be too expensive for us to run?
• Are there client bandwidth concerns? It uses less bandwidth to send a URL versus sending an image...will that be a problem for our users?
• If this is configurable, where does it live in the settings? How do we translate the text into all of the languages we support? How do we explain it to users?

Not saying we shouldn't do this, but this seemingly-simple feature is fairly complicated.

[iwikal]

I was thinking this would be a deliberate action by the user, like a new option that appears beside 'camera' and 'album', not something that happens automatically as soon as I paste a link in the text input. I think that alleviates some of the listed concerns, such as bandwidth, privacy, extensions.

[xathon]

I think the way WhatsApp does it is that when you post a direct link to an image, the link preview shows a download icon you can click to open the regular image share. That way the download stays a deliberate action but doesn't add another persistent icon to the toolbar.

[EvanHahn-Signal]

Makes sense. We'll think about this.

[Penguin-Guru]

I'm not sure how the preview functionality actually works but that seems like the best approach to me. The only problem I imagine is if the file server is configured to remove the file after it is downloaded once. That's probably not likely in this case.