Caller photo transparency in the calling screen (Phone app)

Blurness control of avatar/picture in the phone app, making caller image/picture semi transparent or clear in the calling screen. At present it is very blur, we cannot identify who is calling by seeing the picture, and all pictures looks same.

We had a patch " Disable glass avatar" by coderus till sailfish 2.1 but its unmaintained now
https://openrepos.net/content/coderus/patch-disable-glass-avatar

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Isnā€™t this very similar if not the same as this post?

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Yes you are correct @Maus , In that thread I checked, if we already have some thing for my needs, but when i did not find anything and no response, then i thought of requesting it as as ā€œFeature Requestā€.

I second you @Syed_Yaseen ,

Iā€™m sure this can be easily done with a small tweak in some config file if someone would tell us in what file & line this blurring/transparency is defined. For me as user itā€™s also nearly impossible to find this config file, therefore I ask now.

Q: In what file is this transparency/blurring defined?

Following is the path of the files, /usr/share/voicecall-ui-jolla ā€¦

Not sure, if following is the code,

[root@Xperia10III calling]# grep -ir glass ./ .
./InCallView.qml: y: Theme.itemSizeMedium/2 - height/2 // Theme.itemSizeMedium = glass item default height
./CallDialog.qml: explicitFilters: GlassBlur {
CallDialog.qml: explicitFilters: GlassBlur {
InCallView.qml: y: Theme.itemSizeMedium/2 - height/2 // Theme.itemSizeMedium = glass item default height

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any thoughts @Seven.of.nine.
Can we have something, or it should come from SFOS as new feature?

Sorry for late answer @Syed_Yaseen , had mobile network failure last 2 days. Will have a look at this blurring stuff at the weekend and then report if i can find something.

With the kind help of the community i could successfully remove some annoying blurring stuff in the past and so i could benefit from a much more relaxed user experience. Thanks to all who helped me in the past!

Patches seem to be linked to a particular OS version, so after next version update they often will no longer work. Tweaking in the system files has a better chance to find the right lines again if they change a little, therefore i prefer tweaks more than patches.

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Thank you @Seven.of.nine . Take your time. And thank you for considering the request and looking into it. Appreciate your help

Yes itā€™s the same issue, but thereā€™s also no solution. Trying now on this stuff and will edit + report if iā€™m able to find something senseful. BTW, what was the intention behind this blurring caller picture? I honestly try to understand the purpose of such a ā€˜featureā€™, but i canā€™t!

edit: Sorry, i see no chance for me in this advanced coding stuff. I give up. So I hope that someone of the devs would be so kind and give me a hint where the blurring code is and how to tweak it for ā€˜no more blurringā€™ , leave pictures as they are, or deactivate all blurring effects. :heart:

I donā€™t have many photos associated with my contacts. So I didnā€™t notice that there may be a problem. I am impressed how many users seem to care about this while I never noticed this. Good luck with finding a solution.

I also have no pictures in my contacts, but @Syed_Yaseen 's question brought me to make some experiments for curiosity. So i saw that the display of callers photo is really ugly and senseless. For what shall this be good?


This is the photo i attached to the contact (Picture is sharp and clear):

So I ask myself, as written above: What was the intention to code such things?

@coderus any thoughts ?
I know, you are busy settling in new placeā€¦ you can respond when you have free time, no hurry

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Hi @nephros ,

I saw a patch in web catalog from you for glass effect/blur across the sailfish OS. any idea, how we can remove the blur in the image/picture of the calling screen ?

thank you

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From a very cursory glance the caller image and blur are in /usr/share/voicecall-ui-jolla/calling/CallDialog.qml near the bottom.

The explicitFilter configures the blur effect of the ThemeImageWallpaper component, and a few lines above that the background.wallpaper and background.image properties are responsible for showing an image at all.

Setting them to undefined (instead of checking whether there is an avatar image) should disable the image.
One could also experiment with setting a different filter, or changing the blur parameters.

Personally Iā€™m not tremendously interested in playing with this, however there is a little documentation on the blurring effect here:

Silica Reference Documentation - Sailfish OS

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-qtgraphicaleffects-gaussianblur.html

ā€¦ but for details one will have to look into various places in the Silica and Lipstick qml files.

In fact, there are some dconf tunables for changing the blur parameters system wide:

/desktop/lipstick-jolla-home/blur_iterations
/desktop/lipstick-jolla-home/blur_deviation
/desktop/lipstick-jolla-home/blur_kernel

But when playing with them I saw only minimal changes to the effect. Also, for the calldialog the parameters are set explicitly, so those tunables wonā€™t be used.

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What was the intention to code such things?

I would say to make the Text and Icons in the first Layer more and better visible.
Until today, i have no Problems with the blurred Background-Picture of the Caller and can identify every Caller by this blurry Background Pictures first before i recognize the text.

Other Methods are darken down the Background-Picture to have more contrast to the white Text in the first Layer. On some Photos you may have white Areas, without Blurd/Darken you couldnĀ“t see white Text on that Spot. Another Idea is to add a Drop Shadow to the white Text, which looks often very cheap in Design-Aspects.

Here is what i mean and what is to avoid:

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Yes you are right. Image is very beautiful but readability of the letters is poor.
So another idea is to set the image not as full size screen background with text overlay but keep image, text and buttons apart from each other with image in high quality and beautiful, Name and buttons above, beside or under the image.

While i agree and respect the most of the Design-Decision in SailfishOS, maybe someone can build a Patch for Patch-Manager/Maintain that ā€œDisable glass avatarā€ by coderus till sailfish 2-Patch.

This canĀ“t be said enough:

The SailfishOS-UX-Designer did a great Job. The Design and UI was for me a very big main reason for leaving Android (with a good Windows-Tiles Launcher) to SailfishOS. On the first try of SailfishOS i thought ā€œthis arenĀ“t my beloved windows Phone Tilesā€, but then when i realise the genius concept behind it and got addicted i moved on to it.

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change file /usr/share/voicecall-ui-jolla/calling/CallDialog.qml at the end:

    Component {
        id: wallpaperComponent

        Image {
            id: avatarImage
            parent: __silica_applicationwindow_instance
            anchors.fill: parent
            fillMode: Image.PreserveAspectCrop
            z: -1
            property alias imageUrl: avatarImage.source
        }
    }
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Thank you @coderus . It looks good nowā€¦ Appreciate your help

Iā€™ve same feelings towards the design of this. I cannot complain and I like it as it is but if someone wants to adjust this, itā€™s perhaps a good idea to make a patch.