wall sizes & searches suggestion

In searches when several sizes of a single wall exist, only return 1 result ? (excluding size restricted searches of course)

the default wall opened would then depend on a user setting? could be higher size, or size closer to value

I see what you mean but the problem is that not all the "duplicates" are tagged as such in the system.

That's actually a question of some pretty fundamental design choices concerning how wallpaper data is stored. I'll try to explain it but it's a bit technical.

Current setup The way our data is currently stored treats every uploaded wallpaper (i.e. every image file) as equally important. For example every single upload has its own ID, can be added to favorites individually and so on. As a result every wallpaper also has its own entry in the search index. The search engine simply looks for wallpapers that match the search query and it is very good and fast at doing that (well, mostly). Telling the search engine to do anything more complicated like treating certain matches as duplicates would severely impact performance (assuming it's even possible). The only way around that would be some weird and error prone hacks, which is never a good idea.

The groups that we currently have – the "X other sizes" link you can sometimes find at the top of the sidebar – rely on additional information we store by "grouping" those wallpapers (this is done manually by staff members, not automatically). It is only used by that link and by tags, which are currently shared within a group. That last part with the shared tags was my idea and it was a mistake. It is very difficult to work with and has caused numerous bugs.

The possible alternative The only way to do this properly would be to change the way wallpapers are stored and grouped so that wallpapers that "belong together" are actually represented by a single entry in the database and search index. Basically a "Wallpaper" would no longer represent a single image file but instead the set of all images that "belong together". That is certainly possible but it would be quite a large endeavour, so don't hold your breath. More importantly though it would have some important side effects: · You could no longer fav a wallpaper directly but only that "group". · Same goes for subscriptions. · The current difficulty of deciding whether or not two individual wallpapers should belong together would become a lot more important, even though it is often impossible to determine a satisfactory answer. Wallpapers can be scaled, cropped, mirrored, rotated, re-colored, etc. · We would still have to rely on manually grouping those wallpapers that belong together and we're already struggling to keep up. This situation will hopefully improve once we have duplicate detection (it's coming!) but we'll have to wait and see how that works out.

For what it's worth I'd personally consider it worth changing our setup to the alternative I just described once we have a working duplicate detection. That way when people try to upload a wallpaper that is similar to an existing one we could offer an option to add it to that group. However we'd still have to figure out a lot of details before we can get to that, so far now it's just a dream for a possible distant future.