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Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 12:47 am
by dsesplin
Several weeks ago I deliberately viewed each of the Bible maps to ensure that they were fully downloaded. I then went offline and verified that they were there. Today none of them were downloaded. I had no network so I wasn't able to view them at all. How can I ensure that they stay downloaded?

Re: Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2017 12:19 pm
by dsesplin
dsesplin wrote:Several weeks ago I deliberately viewed each of the Bible maps to ensure that they were fully downloaded. I then went offline and verified that they were there. Today none of them were downloaded. I had no network so I wasn't able to view them at all. How can I ensure that they stay downloaded?
I still have this problem. Is there any way to keep the maps permanently downloaded?

Re: Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:50 pm
by sbradshaw
Images in content don't download to anywhere permanent. When you view them, they're cached temporarily. If you want them to be available offline, your best bet would be to download them from LDS.org or via the LDS Media Library app (I don't know off the top of my head if the maps are in LDS Media Library).

Re: Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2017 9:09 pm
by dsesplin
That seems to be a pretty big flaw. There are a lot of times I need to see images when I'm not connected. It would be nice to have the option to keep them.

Re: Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 11:01 am
by sbradshaw
I'd recommend sending feedback to the support team through the in-app feedback – I agree that it would be nice to have offline images (especially in image-based collections, like New Testament Stories or the Gospel Art Book).

In case you're curious, there are technical reasons why Gospel Library doesn't download images with the content. Content doesn't actually include images – instead, it includes URLs that tell Android (or iOS) where to get the images. To explain:

The HTML code (Gospel Library "content") for a map page might look like this (simplified representation):

Code: Select all

<html>
<body>
<h1>1. Physical Map of the Holy Land</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<img src="https://broadcast.lds.org/crowdsource/mobile/images/1506024/b5745a2fb4be41449b0b7de654f0118b/2231x3247.png" alt="Bible map 1" />
</body>
</html>
In order to make the images available offline, Gospel Library would need to:
  1. Search through each HTML content page that has been downloaded.
  2. Get the URL for each image.
  3. Download the image and store it with app data.
  4. Modify the content so that it points to the local image instead of the broadcast.lds.org URL.
  5. Save the original URL for the image somewhere so that if images get cleared or corrupted somehow they can be downloaded again.
Then, of course, there are questions like: What if the user isn't connected to a good internet collection for downloading images (which can be large), when they first download the content? Do users want all of the images in any content they download to take up space on their device? What about users who, by habit, download all of the content (magazines back to 1971, etc.)? It would be difficult to set different rules for different books, and all of those images add up.

Re: Maps don't stay downloaded.

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 11:40 am
by dsesplin
Thanks for the explanation. I did send feedback. We'll see what their response is. I agree that there are technical issues with html and storage availability. However, the maps for example, are nearly useless to me without the detailed images. It is very frustrating to be without data and not be able to view the images that I could see fine yesterday. I hope the team can find a way to let us manually specify that we want to download and keep content -- especially for image based collections like maps or gospel art etc.