Slideshow randomness?

[matt91]

Does anyone know how the slideshow in Sage picks the photos to display (when set to random mode)?

Our TV runs the slideshow for a few hours each day. We have noticed that photos sometimes appear more often than random chance alone would explain.

There are about 46k JPG images in my photo import directly, and sometimes I'll see 2 or 3 from the same birthday party/Christmas/etc within the span of a few hours. Chance alone could explain this happening once, but when I notice this occurring a few times within the week, it makes me wonder how random the slideshow really is.

Anyone know how the images are selected?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by matt91

Does anyone know how the slideshow in Sage picks the photos to display (when set to random mode)?

Our TV runs the slideshow for a few hours each day. We have noticed that photos sometimes appear more often than random chance alone would explain.

There are about 46k JPG images in my photo import directly, and sometimes I'll see 2 or 3 from the same birthday party/Christmas/etc within the span of a few hours. Chance alone could explain this happening once, but when I notice this occurring a few times within the week, it makes me wonder how random the slideshow really is.

Anyone know how the images are selected?

When the slideshow becomes active the first thing Sage does is get a list of all photos and then call a java method that randomizes the list. It then starts sequentially displaying the photos in the randomized list.

If you are seeing "non-randomness" it's because of the java method Collections.shuffle().

[Opus4]

One thing to keep in mind about randomness is that humans will often see "patterns" in truly random data... if everything were really evenly spaced out such that no 2 similar items ever appeared together, then it isn't really random, but an even distribution instead. Often, people perceive a 2D field of evenly spaced dots as random while a field of random dots are seen as having some sort of pattern that emerges in the random clumps.

Oh -- and if you restart the random slideshow, you will get a new random order and what was shown previously matters not at all.

Andy

[wubdich]

SageTV might improve if pictures would display in a "not-so-random" mode. Displaying a few related pictures and then displaying an other group of related pictures could improve the perception. Total random mode is a little bit to much of randomness ... at least in my point of view. Would it be difficult to implement something like this ... ?

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by wubdich

SageTV might improve if pictures would display in a "not-so-random" mode. Displaying a few related pictures and then displaying an other group of related pictures could improve the perception. Total random mode is a little bit to much of randomness ... at least in my point of view. Would it be difficult to implement something like this ... ?

Sounds like an option for a plugin, now you just have to find someone to make it happen.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by wubdich

SageTV might improve if pictures would display in a "not-so-random" mode. Displaying a few related pictures and then displaying an other group of related pictures could improve the perception. Total random mode is a little bit to much of randomness ... at least in my point of view. Would it be difficult to implement something like this ... ?

That would be cool. Somewhat OT but interesting anyway ... Google Photos is absolutely brilliant. One of the best photo apps I have ever used.