New, Improved Slide Show ?

[PeteCress]

The concept is, IMHO, great. I've got 5,000+ photos online - going back 50-60 years - and we spend hours just watching them go across the screen - a great conversation piece when relatives and others are visiting.

Having said that....

Has anybody thought about writing a better Slide Show facility.

My gripes with the built-in:

• The screen-saver/timeout mode needs to default to allowing Pause, SkipBack, SkipForward, and Resume - like Main Menu | Photos | RANDOM SLIDESHOW does.
• The "Random" aspect needs work. The same photos come up much too often and many, many, many other photos never come up at all.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

• The "Random" aspect needs work. The same photos come up much too often and many, many, many other photos never come up at all.

So you want something like "unique" randomness where it would just give you a random selection of those not already shown? Kind of like randomizing a deck of cards where you "shuffle" them up into a random order and then deal them out until all cards are dealt.

The random mode used for the picture library is a TRUE random display where it picks from the WHOLE list of pictures every time implying that you may get the same pictures multiple times.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

So you want something like "unique" randomness where it would just give you a random selection of those not already shown? Kind of like randomizing a deck of cards where you "shuffle" them up into a random order and then deal them out until all cards are dealt.

The random mode used for the picture library is a TRUE random display where it picks from the WHOLE list of pictures every time implying that you may get the same pictures multiple times.

I don't think it works that way. When the screen show starts it gets a list of all your photos, randomizes the list, and then sequentially displays the randomized list.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

.
The random mode used for the picture library is a TRUE random display where it picks from the WHOLE list of pictures every time implying that you may get the same pictures multiple times.

Does not compute for me.

Out of 5,000 pictures what are the odds that I would repeatedly see the same picture 3 or 4 times in a given session over and over again - day-after-day - and never see the bulk of the 5,000 pictures that are buried let's say three levels deep in the directory hierarchy.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Does not compute for me.

Out of 5,000 pictures what are the odds that I would repeatedly see the same picture 3 or 4 times in a given session over and over again - day-after-day - and never see the bulk of the 5,000 pictures that are buried let's say three levels deep in the directory hierarchy.

Just saying it is possible to get the same picture showing up multiple times before another shows up even once. A computuers random function is a lot closer to random than most humans would produce if they tried to be random themselves but it is still not TRULY random so it is possible the random function is providing some of this but I would think even with that it would be less than 3 or 4 times. So no more ideas.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I don't think it works that way. When the screen show starts it gets a list of all your photos, randomizes the list, and then sequentially displays the randomized list.

If so then it shouldn't get any duplication in the same session. So that would seem to make PeteCress's results a bug. So out of ideas other than a bug.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

If so then it shouldn't get any duplication in the same session. So that would seem to make PeteCress's results a bug. So out of ideas other than a bug.

If the same photo exists multiple times in multiple directories, this would happen.

I know, I know... you'll say there's no way there are duplicates. But it see it all the time in my library... sometimes I'll copy a new set of files into a new directory and it has 10 dupes from another directory. I ran a dupe finder a couple years ago, I ended up finding 100s of duplicate images, some of them duplicated 3-4 times

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I ran a dupe finder a couple years ago, I ended up finding 100s of duplicate images, some of them duplicated 3-4 times

Sounds like something I should do.

Do you recall the name of the dupre finder allpplication?

[KryptoNyte]

This is one of my favorites. I like the way it presents the duplicates side by side so I can decide which one to keep, quickly.

http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

I have mostly used this after some forensic hard drive recovery as it typically creates a crazy amount of duplicate photos and files.

[stuckless]

^^^ That's probably better that what I used... I was on linux so I ran fdupes, which is s commandline tool (i love command line tools).

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

This is one of my favorites. I like the way it presents the duplicates side by side so I can decide which one to keep, quickly.

http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

I have mostly used this after some forensic hard drive recovery as it typically creates a crazy amount of duplicate photos and files.

Thanks for that one.... been running it and I have a *lot* of dupes - as in 79 pages...

OTOH, none of the dupes I have seen so far are the ones that keep recurring in 'Random Slide Show'.... doesn't mean they are not there... but I have not come across them yet.

[hedly]

I have another recommendation. Almost all cameras (and certainly all cell phones) now have rotation sensors in them. The results are put into the EXIF data and it tells how much the photo has to be rotated to be displayed correctly.

but SageTV doesn't read that. So many photos taken by cell phones (in particular) are upside down or sideways.

I used to go through and rotate the photos, but now Win10 automatically rotates the Thumbnails. So while I could rotate all the vertical pictures (although the thumbnails will now sow horizontal instead of vertical because windows gets out of sync), the ones that are taken upside down will still show up that way because I can't tell they are updside down by their respective thumbnails.

So, if Sage could read the EXIF data and rotate the photos accordingly...

randomness: we have ~70K photos and while it does seem to stick in certain folders, I find it OK.

Pausing, navigation: That would be neat. There would just need to be a way to get out of it. Right now any button is used to stop the show.

Overall Presentation: We were at a friends house who has AppleTV. I found it really slick that the photos were presented in frames instead of just showing up on the screen. That might be a nice option...

but the biggest improvement would be reading the EXIF data and auto-rotating the image.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by hedly

Pausing, navigation: That would be neat. There would just need to be a way to get out of it. Right now any button is used to stop the show.

It's probably not so easy - but, unencumbered by any knowledge, I fantasize the application invoking whatever routine already does PHOTOS | RANDOM SLIDESHOW instead of whatever it currently invokes when the idle screen timer kicks in.

[wnjj]

My ideal screensaver would leave all of the photos in their original order, then randomly pick a starting photo. From the starting point, display the next N photos (configurable) then randomly pick a new starting point and repeat.

I like seeing a series of related pictures from a trip or holiday. I’ll often manually stop and restart the screen saver using the remote to find a set I like. Completely random would be frustrating.

Being able to at least use the info button would be awesome. I often find myself wanting to locate a picture that came up to remind myself when or where it was taken. I have to hunt through “photos” to find it later. The problem is the keystrokes are available to be processed at the layer (STV) that’s doing the screensaver.