I think in general we should move away from storing those photos privately within app, it will also make migration story easier in the future if/when we move away from the camera.

Ideally the photos will appear in "Images" category in the Files app and could be read by apps such as Photos.


Lemme look at what we can do with the camera app, assuming anyone will be in the office tomorrow :P 

Is it possible to save the taken photos in (some subdirectory of) Downloads directory? Then they will show up in Images automatically.

(I would admit that saving taken photos in "Downloads" sounds weird...)

IMHO we should save them to Drive. It will guarantee that they are backed up, and will be picked up by photos.google.com (I think?).

We can do that easily if we move the Camera app to Chromium repository and make it a component extension as we've done with the ZIP unpacker extension. That would also make the release process simpler and allow to use private apis which means access to Drive without any problems.

moving to Chromium repository SGTM. mtomasz, if we make the Camera app a component extension, will it be able to write files to Downloads? Writing to Downloads would be safer as the default behavior since not everyone uses Drive.

Supporting Drive/Photos is a great idea. However, users' photos are obviously privacy sensitive.
What I would recommend is saving them locally and prompting the user to opt into auto-backup the photos.

I for example enable Google Photos' auto-backup on any Chromebook I get, even for screenshots. 

@satorux: Yes, we'll be able to write to any location including Downloads. One concern of writing to Downloads is that on Chromebook Downloads is ephemeral, and the files are not guaranteed to stay there.

This is a common point of confusion with users and results in frequent posts in CBC. I would welcome an improvement.

I can provide links to relevant posts from CBC if you need examples.

The idea of using Images folder is good, except for the fact that Chromebooks without Play Store do not currently have an Images folder. 

I would hope that this is integrated into the other Files/Downloads redesign efforts that would also address comments #6 and #5.

#CBC-RS/TC-watchlist

Re #6 - weifangsun@ is looking into auto-backup to Google photos that the user can enable. 
Re #7 - thanks Jim! I definitely agree this is a problem and we should fix it.

Tomasz, how hard would it be to also migrate existing photos from camera to a system file folder and save future ones in the same folder?

Omri, if we ask users to choose destination and then we'd remember it for the future then it's easy. If we want to arbitrarily choose the destination without asking the user then it's a significant amount of work - we'd need to move the Camera app code to Chromium repository and ship as port of the image. This is not technically hard, but will require third party reviews which may take plenty of time.

Weifang and Maria are building a proposal on how to handle file structure on ChromeOS which will address problems of Camera or Text editor.

Weifang, when can we expect that to be ready?

Weifang, we just discovered a bug in the existing Camera app's "Save to disk" feature. This should be addressed along with the other changes.

Users on CBC reported they could not save a picture --
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chromebook-central/8cGuSn_Wg3Q;context-place=forum/chromebook-central

I tested and found that attempts to save to a read-only folder such as Images does not work (as I expected), but there is no error message shown that would indicate this is a read-only folder. This is quite confusing to users.

App should not even allow selection of read-only folders.

See my test procedure in the referenced thread.

I think it's a bug that after the folder selection dialog box comes up and I choose "Downloads" or another read/write folder, that the box just closes and gives an arbitrary name to my downloaded camera image.  Before that happens another window should pop up and allow me to input the name and hopefully the image format (.png, .jpg, .gif, etc...).  

I also agree that a warning box should pop up if you select a read/only folder and then you should be allowed to choose another read/write folder instead.

March 17 2018 and Im having the exact same problem now.   even in the Files app I can see the photo, but I cant even copy and paste to anywhere....will not let me do anything with the pic.   wtf????  I just did an update last night too, but I did not have this problem in the past.

(Bulk Edit) Adding the new conops Chrome OS hotlist to all open issues with the "#CBC-RS/TC-watchlist" tag, our former tracking tag.

This will be resolved by crbug.com/816363

As a teacher using Chromebooks, it would be great if photos taken would automatically save to Drive. The current set up is not very user friendly for my 9 year olds. Especially as I also use ephemeral memory and the photos disappear as soon as the device is closed.

Confirmed working with Camera app update in Beta 70.0.3538.69

Older photos appeared in the Downloads folder as well.

Google Chrome	70.0.3538.69 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
Revision	49b19fa81cd9ac65c8f1ce0135c476d871d7177a-refs/branch-heads/3538@{#1008}
Platform	11021.51.0 (Official Build) beta-channel caroline
Firmware Version	Google_Caroline.7820.384.0