Deleting an image that is used as a cover in an album fails to delete the database entry

[Jokler]

As a result the image is deleted but not removed from the list or any albums.

I am not sure what the best way of doing this is but I am starting to think that not deleting it and letting the user know why is the best way to handle this.

[dolanske]

Would a flow like this work?

• Check every album coverKey
• If any album has it set to our image's id, go to said album and change coveryKey to the first image of that album
• Delete our image (no longer set as coverKey anywhere)

or did I misunderstand the issue?

[Jokler]

This works until you try to delete an image which is the only image in an album.

[Jokler]

Maybe we could have a default image which gets set as a cover when the previous one gets deleted. I am not sure how I feel about that though.

[dolanske]

I would say, if you delete the last image of an album, we set it as a draft and user gets a notification about it? And we can link to the album edit page where they can either delete it or upload images in it.

[dolanske]

My possible solution

When deleting an image, we query the albums it is part of, for each album we have to perform a few checks

1. If an image is the coverKey of said album
   1. If is more than 1 image left in the album, we replace coverKey with the id of the first image. And delete the original image
   2. If the image we are deleting is the last image on the album, we return an error with a message similar to this example "You can't delete the last picture in an album, please add more pictures or delete the album itself"
2. If an image is not a coverKey of said album we can simply remove it

If an image is part of multiple albums, we should keep a variable, something like canDelete which by default is set to true and if image doesn't pass any of the album checks for deletion, at the end of the loop, we can return the same error as in 1.ii.

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This operation could be pretty heavy, if for each image we query an album(s). Because in most cases, I think people would remove images in bulk. On the front-end, no matter how many selections there are, I always have an array, over which I iterate and call the delete endpoint.

I propose we allow to send in an array of strings, and handle the looping on the back-end. We could then optimize fetching all the albums, as we can scan the ID's and fetch all the relevant albums just once.

[dolanske]

What if, we simply don't allow deleting images which are used as coverKey? Backend returns an error stating said image can not be deleted because it is used as an album cover image.

If user wanted to remove the picture anyway. they can change the cover image and them remove it without any problems.