Changing or adding pics in place of flickr pics

[Stingly]

Me neither - all I got was a blank screen instead of the flickr pics. I thought that it might be a file permission thing maybe? I copied my photos from my Vista machine... I'll try the .pl hack later I think.

[darrenmason]

Try
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Use_my_own_pictures_in_the_Screen_Saver#Setting_an_attribute_from_the_web_admin_screens

Let me know if anything needs clarification...

Regards
Darren

[balyho0o]

Sadly, I haven't been able to get either method to work for me either. I initially tried the script but with no luck, just a blank screen and when removing the pl script and adding some of my own pics to the directory I ended up with pretty much the same result.

Happily it looks like there is some talent making progress on my request: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2713 so stay tuned.

[balyho0o]

Try
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Use_my_own_pictures_in_the_Screen_Saver#Setting_an_attribute_from_the_web_admin_screens

Let me know if anything needs clarification...

Regards
Darren

Thanks Darren. I will take a look at this. Hadn't seen it before.

[Stingly]

That looks really promising! l'll give it a go tomorrow!

[Stingly]

Hmmmm... followed the instructions on the wiki page and added the file association etc to a few sample JPG images (all .JPG) in the flickr/2007/ folder via the web admin. Did a reload, and I now get a blank black screen that fades to white, pauses, and then back to black again. Its almost like it can't load the images at all? Am I doing something wrong? I've disabled the flickr.pl script and deleted all the sub folders and their images from the 2007 folder...

[majkaj]

Hmmmm... followed the instructions on the wiki page and added the file association etc to a few sample JPG images (all .JPG) in the flickr/2007/ folder via the web admin. Did a reload, and I now get a blank black screen that fades to white, pauses, and then back to black again. Its almost like it can't load the images at all? Am I doing something wrong? I've disabled the flickr.pl script and deleted all the sub folders and their images from the 2007 folder...

Wow, I am sorry that folks are having problems.  I am at work right now.  When I go home for lunch, I will double check my settings and report back in.  But , I really didn't do much of anything.  And, yes, I have my own pictures showing up.

Mike

[MediaMonkey]

I followed the wiki page and got two of my pictures in the slide show. My pictures are copied to a different directory out side flickr. I am getting blck screens too. I think the reason may be that I just deleted all the images from flickr folder leaving all the database entries and probably that is causing the black screens and bright white fade-in and all that. I would like to find out exactly what is changing in the database while setting the attribute and would like to do it entirely in a SQL entirely outside the admin page.

[totallymaxed]

Hmmmm... followed the instructions on the wiki page and added the file association etc to a few sample JPG images (all .JPG) in the flickr/2007/ folder via the web admin. Did a reload, and I now get a blank black screen that fades to white, pauses, and then back to black again. Its almost like it can't load the images at all? Am I doing something wrong? I've disabled the flickr.pl script and deleted all the sub folders and their images from the 2007 folder...

Well Darren's Wiki page worked for me... I renamed /usr/pluto/bin/flickr.pl to /usr/pluto/bin/flickr.pl.backup then I deleted the /home/flickr/2007 directory. I then added the new attribute to about 20 images I copied into the /home/public/data/pictures directory and did a reload... when the screensaver kicked next time my pics appeared :-)

[majkaj]

I see that some folks are having their pictures show up.  Great!

I am back at work; I did check where I put the photos ...I put the photos in /home/flickr/2007.  I think that this is a symlink to /home/public/data/pictures.

Mike

[darrenmason]

To all those having problems with white images etc....

I have also had this problem on one of my MDs. The same pictures show correctly on all the other MDs.
This MD is a laptop using ATI drivers and UI2 with overlay (rather than alpha blend).
My other two MDs that are currently running are both using Nvidia drivers and are running UI2 with Alpha Blending.
So I assume that it is somehow related to either the driver OR the Alpha Blending (or both I guess). The other difference is that the other two are hooked up to TV resolutions (TV[PAL] and Projector[720p]) whereas the laptop is using its screen in a PC resolution[1024x768 from memory].

The laptop does have some of the pictures showing up however - this made me play around a bit and I resized one of the pictures to a smaller resolution and it then showed up. So it looks like it is a problem showing pictures of a certain resolution and greater.
I have not experimented enough to prove this 100% or to find the resolutions that cause the problem, but a workaround might be to create a copy of the picture you want to use and resize it for the screen saver. Bit of a pain I know.

The flickr.pl script does resize images if they are above a certain size - so it might be a known limitation (by the Pluto Developers) either that or they are just saving space.

wrt. deleting the flickr images - thhis should not be a problem as the code checks for file existence before adding it to the list of images to display.

HTH
Darren

[Stingly]

The laptop does have some of the pictures showing up however - this made me play around a bit and I resized one of the pictures to a smaller resolution and it then showed up. So it looks like it is a problem showing pictures of a certain resolution and greater.
I have not experimented enough to prove this 100% or to find the resolutions that cause the problem, but a workaround might be to create a copy of the picture you want to use and resize it for the screen saver. Bit of a pain I know.

Mate! You are a genius! Resizing my pictures to fit a 1024x1024 area worked perfectly! Nice one! 

[totallymaxed]

To all those having problems with white images etc....

I have also had this problem on one of my MDs. The same pictures show correctly on all the other MDs.
This MD is a laptop using ATI drivers and UI2 with overlay (rather than alpha blend).
My other two MDs that are currently running are both using Nvidia drivers and are running UI2 with Alpha Blending.
So I assume that it is somehow related to either the driver OR the Alpha Blending (or both I guess). The other difference is that the other two are hooked up to TV resolutions (TV[PAL] and Projector[720p]) whereas the laptop is using its screen in a PC resolution[1024x768 from memory].

The laptop does have some of the pictures showing up however - this made me play around a bit and I resized one of the pictures to a smaller resolution and it then showed up. So it looks like it is a problem showing pictures of a certain resolution and greater.
I have not experimented enough to prove this 100% or to find the resolutions that cause the problem, but a workaround might be to create a copy of the picture you want to use and resize it for the screen saver. Bit of a pain I know.

The flickr.pl script does resize images if they are above a certain size - so it might be a known limitation (by the Pluto Developers) either that or they are just saving space.

wrt. deleting the flickr images - thhis should not be a problem as the code checks for file existence before adding it to the list of images to display.

HTH
Darren

Yes its definitely the size of the image thats causing the problem. It just so happened that many of my test images were within the size limits for the ScreenSaver. I resized a number of much bigger images that were not displaying even though they had the correct attributes in the DB... and magically after a resize they appeared!

You can do the resize using the command line tool 'convert'. The following line will resize the image at /home/public/data/pictures/IMG_1023.JPG to 1024x683 and then write it back to /home/public/data/pictures/IMG_1023.JPG again;

sudo convert -sample 1024x683 /home/public/data/pictures/IMG_1023.JPG /home/public/data/pictures/IMG_1023.JPG

Andrew

PS One of the devs at Pluto just told me that the size limits for the ScreenSaver binary are based on the following formula;

image_width * image_height < 3,240,000

[chrisbirkinshaw]

That's why I hacked the perl script - as that way the images are still resized.

Chris

[totallymaxed]

That's why I hacked the perl script - as that way the images are still resized.

Chris

Yes I looked at your changes. Nice work.

I am writing a new script that uses inotifywait to watch the directory for files that are moved into it or are deleted. In fact its the same call that the UpdateMedia binary uses to watch for media files that are added to the lmce directory structure.