Auto Stacking Images

[AlreadyTakenJonas]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I want to switch from Google Photos to Nextcloud and I really like your App. However, I tend to make a lot of photos of the same thing, e.g. trying different angles for my photo. When my girlfriend or I make portraits of each other we typically have a ton of pictures.

All these pictures end up in my gallery, making it hard to find anything between all the redundant images. I usually need only one or two of the many images we take and want to delete the rest eventually.

Google Photos solves this quite nicely with their auto Stacking feature.

Describe the solution you'd like
The auto Stacking feature works in three steps:

1. Similar images are assigned to the same stack. Similarity is based mainly on the time and location the image was taken.
   Maybe some duplicate detection or AI recognition or some image distance metric or which camera took the image. That's a detail I didn't have time to look into.

2. Instead of displaying each image in the frontend, the app shows I only one image of the whole stack. The user can click on that image and scroll through all images in the stack, but only the top image of the stack is shown in the time line / search result list / whatever.
   The user can also combine two stacks into one.

3. When viewing a single stack, the user can choose a different top picture from the stack, put some images in a new stack, delete images or the whole stack.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I tried the duplicate finder app, but it does not clarify similar pictures only true duplicates. And it does not change the fact, that my time line is swamped with similar images.

I tested photo prism, but it's auto Stacking feature did not work for some reason and photo prism is not a next cloud app, but an extra service I'd have to host or buy.

Google Photos is an alternative, of course. However, I'd like to put all my files and photos in the same cloud. So it would be nice, if I could manage my images via a nextcloud app.

The end
I realize this is a huge change. But I think it would be a really good addition to your app. And it is one of the most helpful features I use for organizing my images.

Given that this feature impacts the way images are displayed a lot, other users might prefer to switch it off in the settings. Which would probably complicate things.

I'd also image you could stack more than just images. Not sure if it makes sense to have different media types in the same stack, though. Or if it makes sense to stack e.g. videos at all.

Thanks for indulging me until the end and I am happy to answer any questions if you have them. And I would really like to hear, what you think about my idea. And how do-able you think it is.