element-hq / element-hq/element-meta

Automatically save received media to Photos

Open
#3,301 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
T-Enhancement
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
112
Forks
25
Avg merge
6h 6m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

### Your use case

Summary
Please add an option in Element X for iOS to automatically save received images and videos to the iOS Photos app.
Proposed behavior
Add a setting such as:
Automatically save received media to Photos

When enabled, images and videos received in chats would automatically be saved to the user's Photos library.

Ideally, the setting could offer the following options:

Off (default)
Images only
Images and videos
It would also be useful if Element X could optionally save the media to a dedicated “Element X” album in Photos, making it easy to distinguish automatically saved media from other photos.
Why this would be useful
Currently, received media has to be saved manually. For users who use Element X as their primary messenger, automatically saving received photos and videos is a convenient and familiar behavior from other messaging apps.
This would also make it much easier to access received media from the normal iOS Photos app without having to find the original message again.

Privacy considerations
Since automatically saving media can have privacy implications, this should be an opt-in setting and disabled by default.
It would also be useful to respect the iOS Photos permission settings and only save media after the user has granted Element X the required permission.

Thank you for considering this feature!

[https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/6052#issuecomment-5366354196](https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/6052#issuecomment-5366354196)

### Have you considered any alternatives?

_No response_

### Additional context

_No response_

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by reading the linked Element X iOS issue and its referenced comment for existing implementation context. Clarify the setting options, Photos permission handling, media types, and album behavior; the feature is done when the agreed opt-in behavior works for received images and videos without saving by default.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ios
Domain
mobile
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.