Fantastic Photo Frame

Software for displaying photos on a screen, making it look good and easy to update.

The application will display photos that are placed in a specific directory, selecting one at random and showing it for a while.

To avoid having black strips of screen on the sides, (since the images can be in any ratio), the pictures are bordered with a photo-frame style 'card' mount, that will readjust its window to fit any photo.

Setup

The following is more or less how I set it up on a Raspberry Pi.

Get repo and enter directory

git clone https://github.com/samuelfekete/fantastic-photo-frame
cd fantastic-photo-frame

Install requirements for Pillow:

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools
sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev python-tk

Install requirements photo frame.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Make it startup and restart on exit.

sudo apt-get install supervisor
sudo cp photoframe.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/photoframe.conf
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo supervisorctl restart photoframe

Sync with a google drive.

Install rclone following the instructions here: http://rclone.org/install/

Create images directory. Photoframe will check this directory for pictures.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/photoframe/images
sudo chown pi:pi /opt/photoframe/images

To mount it virtually, (photos get fetched from the internet and not stored locally):

rclone mount google_drive: fantastic-photo-frame/static/images/ --allow-non-empty

To sync a local directory (photos are stored locally)

rclone sync google_drive: fantastic-photo-frame/static/images/

and add a cronjob to sync every hour or so.

13 * * * * /usr/sbin/rclone sync google_drive: /opt/photoframe/images/

You can combine the two options by having two sub-directories in /opt/photoframe/images/, one that is mounted and one that is synced. This way there will always be photos, even when the internet connction is lost, and when there is an internet connection an unlimited number of images can be served from the cloud.

Additional Raspberry Pi config

Set: framebuffer_depth=24 in /boot/config.txt to increase bits per pixel.

To stop the screen from going black due to inactivity, run: sudo apt-get install xscreensaver and disable screen saver