Allow sharing multiple photos

Pirate Praveen Public Seen by 7

Introduce and describe the topic

Currently bluetooth send files (from bluetooth settings) allows only sending a single file at a time. Even Dino allows sending only a single photo. Dino file picker shows thumbnails but bluetooth send files shows only list view.

Why is this important?

Sharing photos is a common use case when people meet, others request sharing photos we take. Today I had 50+ photos of an event to share and I had to use bluetooth-sendto command line to send all the photos. I had to specify device address and use pattern matching. On android it is very simple and straight forward. Select all photos in gallery app and choose share via bluetooth.

How would you like people to respond?

We should make it easy to share multiple photos via bluetooth and messaging apps.

Badri Sunderarajan Tue 9 Sep 2025 8:36AM

The file picker is already capable of selecting multiple files, which is does in some cases (eg. when adding attachments from Thunderbird or uploading to a form where multiple files are allowed). So, this sounds more like the limitations of each individual app.

Does XMPP have a concept of sending multiple files in the same message? If not, then the solution would be basically to run a `for` loop and send each file one at a time. By the way, what is the behaviour for Android based XMPP clients like Conversations and Monocles? I forgot whether they accept multiple files or not.

For Bluetooth, KaiOS has an option to share multiple files but it does them one by one and I have to "accept" each one separately at the other end when receiving on GNOME. (I haven't tried the other way, i.e. using bluetooth-sendto from Linux to KaiOS). I'm not sure if this is a limitation of KaiOS, GNOME, or the Bluetooth protocol itself. Are other people able to share multiple files and accept them on the other end in one go?

I agree that sharing multiple files (specially photos) is important to have good support for.

Pirate Praveen Tue 9 Sep 2025 11:01AM

@Badri Sunderarajan I could select multiple files with Monocles Chat, it was sent as multiple files. When I sent multiple photos with bluetooth-sendto, at android end they only had to accept once, all files were transferred in one go.