HUB: Not user friendly to add multiple attachments - Change order of "compressing menu"??

Every day I send dozens of E-mails which contain images (about 6-8) on average.
I stopped doing so as with the Hub it's basically one big guess (shoot & miss) how many images can be added to one E-mail. Sometimes it's 2, sometimes 3, sometimes 4.

It's very annoying to see this message again and again:

Attachments not added. 18mb limit exceeded.

This doesn't make any sense to start with, as 25MB seems to be the limit for both Gmail/Yahoo (which I use most often). Email Attachment Size Limits For Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo

Only if you guessed the right amount of images one can see the "compress pop-up" after hitting the send button.

Send:

Image Size

The total size of your attachments is 12.7 MB. Compress images to reduce the size of your message.

0 Original (12.7 MB)
0 Large (778.4 KB)
0 Medium (240.6 KB)
0 Small (72.1 KB)

I dislike having to split-up my E-mail and send multiple e-mails; each containing only 2 images.
To be honest, other peoples mailboxes becomes one big mess with multiple E-mails about the same topic and I'm pretty much tired of this shoot & miss game when adding attachements.

Solution:
Do it like Apple does with Mail.

-Remove the "Attachments not added. 18mb limit exceeded" message when adding attachments.
-Change the order of the file compression pop-up to make this message turn-up AFTER adding the desired amount of attachments.

Saves everybody time and takes away the irritation.

It's rare I send an email that contains more than 18mb of attachments, but I agree the limit should be raised, and the offer to compress could be changed as you describe.

I usually use a Google Drive link for so many large attachments. Saves my servers too!

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

Discussed with the engineering team, and they reminded me that we actually have a way to trigger this manually today if you're getting close to the attachment size limit. In the email compose screen, when you've added some image attachments and you're close to the limit - tap the 3 dots (overflow menu) in the top right corner of the screen and simply select "Resize Images" and you should be able to re-size them on the fly to your desired size and continue adding more.

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

Discussed with the engineering team, and they reminded me that we actually have a way to trigger this manually today if you're getting close to the attachment size limit. In the email compose screen, when you've added some image attachments and you're close to the limit - tap the 3 dots (overflow menu) in the top right corner of the screen and simply select "Resize Images" and you should be able to re-size them on the fly to your desired size and continue adding more.

Hello c_bryant34,

Thanks for this nice tip: it somehow never crossed my mind to click on the 3 dots to see if there were options that could make life a bit more easier in this regard. So, I appreciate it big time as a temporary bypass, however, I hope this does not mean that the engineering team will not consider adding a more user-friendly/time-saving solution.

Yes, the bypass is great for the time being, but - with all respect- in the end it's still not really an user-friendly/time-saving procedure.
* You can basically still only add 2 images at the same time----> It's basically not any faster than just send 3 mails; each containing 2 attachments.
* I truly hope that the engineering team would find an easy fix to do it Apple-style, meaning, get rid of or move
"Attachments not added. 18mb limit exceeded"-message to show after hitting the send button and not before that time.
Ideally, I still think one should be able to add as many attachments (images) as one likes (or at least 10), and after that give the option to compress (maybe with the 3 dots button) AND/OR have the "compress menu" show up after hitting the send button (Apple-style).

[EDIT: I just tested the temporary bypass and the "trick" and unfortunately does not seem to work. The attachments do indeed show the resized size, but when adding the next 2 images I get the "Attachments not added. 18mb limit exceeded"-message again.]

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

Discussed with the engineering team, and they reminded me that we actually have a way to trigger this manually today if you're getting close to the attachment size limit. In the email compose screen, when you've added some image attachments and you're close to the limit - tap the 3 dots (overflow menu) in the top right corner of the screen and simply select "Resize Images" and you should be able to re-size them on the fly to your desired size and continue adding more.

Did you or the engineering team try this before you posted? It doesn't work :(

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

Discussed with the engineering team, and they reminded me that we actually have a way to trigger this manually today if you're getting close to the attachment size limit. In the email compose screen, when you've added some image attachments and you're close to the limit - tap the 3 dots (overflow menu) in the top right corner of the screen and simply select "Resize Images" and you should be able to re-size them on the fly to your desired size and continue adding more.

Originally Posted by Brulging_Jersey

Did you or the engineering team try this before you posted? It doesn't work :(

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

I haven't been online since February first, but I wonder how this is all coming along in the meantime.;)
This is really my only beef regarding attachments. Tbh, it not only takes away the productivity but also the joy to quickly send pictures on the spot.:crying::(

Originally Posted by WT44

I haven't been online since February first, but I wonder how this is all coming along in the meantime.;)
This is really my only beef regarding attachments. Tbh, it not only takes away the productivity but also the joy to quickly send pictures on the spot.:crying::(

We're working on a few optimizations in the area that might help this out specifically.

PS. I did try it before suggesting it, and it seemed to work for me. Sorry to hear you're not seeing that. After electing to re-size the image attachments, do you see their size get updated in the attachments list?

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

We're working on a few optimizations in the area that might help this out specifically.

PS. I did try it before suggesting it, and it seemed to work for me. Sorry to hear you're not seeing that. After electing to re-size the image attachments, do you see their size get updated in the attachments list?

It's not only with my device but with other peoples Priv too. ;)
Do you perhaps use a developer phone? Or some kind of other test phone for BlackBerry team members?
That would make sense.

I re-tested it just today.

For example 6 pics. (17.4 MB) > 3 Dots >
Large (708.5 KB)
Medium (215.7 KB)
Small (69.1 KB)

When I pick any of the options, it'll resize accordingly.
So yes, the size gets updated in the attachment list.

In this case I choose to resize to large (708.5 KB).

Then I continue adding more pics by clicking on the paperclip.

Unfortunately, I then get the pop-up again saying:
"Attachments not added. 18 MB limit exceeded".

It's as if the hub remembers the original attached 17.4 MB even after resizing. :huh::confused:

But a different solution would be better to start with as with this method you still loose much time doing mathematics to see how much pics you can add under the 18 MB limit before clicking on the 3 dots.

Hm.....at first I thought the new recent update of the hub would bring a change in this area, which wasn't the case unfortunately.
Then I thought maybe Marshmallow would bring out the best of that recent update of the Hub, which wasn't the case either.
Nothing has changed for the better and it's still exactly like I wrote on 03-17-16, 11:36 AM :(
Is it still in the planning to fix it?

BTW, what makes me even more sad than the aforementioned is the removal of the USB mass storage functionality for SD CARDS:
BB seemed to be the only one who somehow customized/tweaked Lollipop to make this feature possible. PLEASE, bring it back for Marshmallow.
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...l#post12416110

Yes the improvement I mentioned is still coming. In our next release.

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

Yes the improvement I mentioned is still coming. In our next release.

This is why I love BlackBerry's new strategy of being present and represented on CrackBerry: being in contact with the consumers and making a better product by incorporating peoples suggestions.

Thanks for the update, c_bryant34!

Aside from the fact that it works perfectly now, can I ask if you guys can maybe fine-tune it though?

Between "original" and "large" the pic resizing/compression is tremendous and the loss of quality pretty significant. The difference is too much.
Strangely enough, the difference between large, medium, and small on the other hand is pretty much insignificant.

I hope you can balance out the increments between small, medium, large and original.
In practice, in this day with people having large data bundles, probably few would currently use medium or small: difference between medium and small is insignificant and loss of quality too much compared to the current "large" (>1 MB for a few photos). Large is already small enough in practice (too small).

Ideally,

"Large" would always resize/compress all attachments to the E-mail limit of max 15 MB. (Or MAX 10MB?)
"Medium" to maybe half of 15.
"Small" to what large is now.

Or you could add an Extra Large and Extra small?
In that case it would ideally be:

Original: Original
XL: Resize/compress to the general E-mail limit of ~15 MB
L: ~ Half of XL
M: ~ Half of L
S: ~ Half of M
XS: ~ Half of S

Some examples from the fields to show the big gap between original and large and the small gap between small, medium and large.

As said, maybe this can be balanced out a bit more with some fine-tuning for a future update in a way that the difference between original and large is less significant and the differences between small, medium and large are more significant.

5 pics.
Original: 21.7 MB
Large: 956.6 KB
Medium: 280.3 KB
Small: 83.4 KB

6 Pics.
Original: 27.5 MB
Large: 1.2 MB
Medium: 357.7 KB
Small: 104.1 KB

8 pics.
Original: 37.6 MB
Large: 1.6 MB
Medium: 483.0 KB
Small: 143.1 KB

Originally Posted by WT44

This is why I love BlackBerry's new strategy of being present and represented on CrackBerry: being in contact with the consumers and making a better product by incorporating peoples suggestions.

Thanks for the update, c_bryant34!

Aside from the fact that it works perfectly now, can I ask if you guys can maybe fine-tune it though?

Between "original" and "large" the pic resizing/compression is tremendous and the loss of quality pretty significant. The difference is too much.
Strangely enough, the difference between large, medium, and small on the other hand is pretty much insignificant.

I hope you can balance out the increments between small, medium, large and original.
In practice, probably in this day with people having large data bundles, few would currently use medium or small: difference between medium and small is insignificant and loss of quality too much compared to the current "large" (>1 MB for a few photos) is already small enough in practice.

Ideally,

"Large" would always resize/compress all attachments to the E-mail limit of max 15 MB. (Or MAX 10MB?)
"Medium" to maybe half of 15.
"Small" to what large is now.
Or you could add an Extra small also?

Some examples from the fields to show the big gap between original and large and the small gap between small, medium and large.

As said, maybe this can be balanced out a bit more with some fine-tuning for a future update in a way that the difference between original and large is less significant and the differences between small, medium and large are more significant.

5 pics.
Original: 21.7 MB
Large: 956.6 KB
Medium: 280.3 KB
Small: 83.4 KB

6 Pics.
Original: 27.5 MB
Large: 1.2 MB
Medium: 357.7 KB
Small: 104.1 KB

8 pics.
Original: 37.6 MB
Large: 1.6 MB
Medium: 483.0 KB
Small: 143.1 KB

Nice suggestion ,agreed

Very good suggestion. I'll discuss with the team. I'm not sure how much of this we are able to control, but would make sense to spread it out a bit more if we can.

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

Very good suggestion. I'll discuss with the team. I'm not sure how much of this we are able to control, but would make sense to spread it out a bit more if we can.

I just realized that there is no resize menu when adding video('s) when I tried adding a 34MB video I just shot with the cam. It attached it, it sends, but obviously it got bounced (or I think it got bounced it says send but next to it I see a red circle with a white exclamation mark in it).
Only for images you have the "Image size" pop-up with original/Large/Medium/Small.
I'm just throwing out some ideas here, but would it technically be possible to also incorporate a video resize menu for any video you like to add as an attachment (or restrict it for vids you have shot with for example the the Priv's camera)? This means compressing videos of lets say MAX 50-100 MB (or whatever more amount?) to a lower resolution so that it shrinks to a file size of the E-Mail limit of 18MB?

You probably could... But the quality is going to be massively degraded.

Originally Posted by WT44

I just realized that there is no resize menu when adding video('s) when I tried adding a 34MB video I just shot with the cam. It attached it, it sends, but obviously it got bounced (or I think it got bounced it says send but next to it I see a red circle with a white exclamation mark in it).
This means compressing videos of lets say MAX 50-100 MB (or whatever more amount?) to a lower resolution so that it shrinks to a file size of the E-Mail limit of 18MB?

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

You probably could... But the quality is going to be massively degraded.

I just discovered this too sending a 27MB video as mail via hub (which worked for me btw as I knew the 2 mail accounts could do as they are on my personal mail server and hub seems not to warn on 18MB when using mp4 instead of pictures).

But now for cody and the team: I tried as workaround to save the video I also send via threema (like WhatsApp) and this compressed version of around 2MB while degraded is quite OK for mobile use and it doesn't seem to bug the millions of messenger users. So perhaps some kind of compression could be done, but I also recognise it is even more complicated to predict the correct compression rate on vids than on pics.

And thanks there is no hard limit at 18MB so I can still send large mails if I know the 2 mailaccounts can do it.

Originally Posted by c_bryant34

You probably could... But the quality is going to be massively degraded.

Is this still in the queue to be available one day?
The "degraded" quality of the compressed video can't be much worse than the compressed small/medium/large pics currently are.;) Gizmo is right in that respect. Also, I remember with legacy devices that we still had the .3gp compression. It wasn't $hitty at all for simple social media/smartphone purposes. I'm sure that any compression done today, will be way better than the compressed files of .3gp videos ever were.

Btw, conceivably more important,
what is the status regarding the software tweak to lessen the gap between original/large/medium/small as mentioned in post #11 of 05-27-16.
Unfortunately, it seems that nothing changed since then. Its still not spread out considerably more, if at all.
"Small"/"medium" have always been pretty much obsolete and of no use and "large" is hardly of any use either, except for maybe a few photography purposes where you want to send 2 or 3 pics (although the massive compression between "original" and "large" remains to be quite bothersome in that case too).

On the business side,
For convenience sake, I often prefer to take a couple of photos of some documents, magazine/newspaper articles (instead of scanning it). Compressing 4-6 photos to large, already makes reading the text impossible.

I really hope you guys are still planing to tweak some things here, preferably in accordance with post #11.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by WT44

Is this still in the queue to be available one day?
The "degraded" quality of the compressed video can't be much worse than the compressed small/medium/large pics currently are.;) Gizmo is right in that respect. Also, I remember with legacy devices that we still had the .3gp compression. It wasn't $hitty at all for simple social media/smartphone purposes. I'm sure that any compression done today, will be way better than the compressed files of .3gp videos ever were.

Btw, conceivably more important,
what is the status regarding the software tweak to lessen the gap between original/large/medium/small as mentioned in post #11 of 05-27-16.
Unfortunately, it seems that nothing changed since then. Its still not spread out considerably more, if at all.
"Small"/"medium" have always been pretty much obsolete and of no use and "large" is hardly of any use either, except for maybe a few photography purposes where you want to send 2 or 3 pics (although the massive compression between "original" and "large" remains to be quite bothersome in that case too).

On the business side,
For convenience sake, I often prefer to take a couple of photos of some documents, magazine/newspaper articles (instead of scanning it). Compressing 4-6 photos to large, already makes reading the text impossible.

I really hope you guys are still planing to tweak some things here, preferably in accordance with post #11.

Thanks.

Agreed! The definitions of 'small', 'medium' and 'large' need to change. The current 'large' should become the new 'small', and there should be one or two larger sizes available.

This, at least, should be implemented for the North American market, where we're not watching every MB that we send. I would gladly attach more original size photos if not for the 25 MB email limit imposed on me by MS Exchange.

Updated the Hub app today to version 1.5.0.12372.
No improvement....

Attachment 417115

I would like to see the sizing for attachments updated as well. Anyone know if this is on the list for a future release one day?