I am trying to build a digital picture frame. It would simply rotate through pictures from a directory. I am running the latest Ubuntu Core (core18) on a Raspberry Pi 3.
I installed mir-kiosk and can show a webpage with the wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk snap. I could build a website that rotates through the images but that would be overkill, a simple eog --fullscreen *.png or something would do. Problem is eog isn’t build as a kiosk snap so that doesn’t work.
What is the easiest way to rotate through a list of images in a directory on Ubuntu Core?
I keep reading about fbi but I don’t think it has been snapped yet. Same for the CLI picture viewers out there like feh, eog or fim.
Does anybody know of a simple kiosk-ready snap that can show images?
i suspect next to rolling your own picture viewer a website is really the easiest, wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk is super reliable and stable so you wouldnt have to care about the viewer side itself but only for the slideshow part …
that said, if you need some template code to snap a slideshow viewer yourself, i do have some (old) code at https://github.com/ogra1/picviewer-snap that you could probably easily turn into a picture frame viewer (picviewer -t 10 /path/to/pics called by a mir kiosk wrapper in a daemon process should be enough)
i found the idea of having to scp the pictures to the device and then moving them to /var/snap/picviewer-kiosk/common rather awkward, so i added a little browser based file-manager to the snap that allows you to add/remove pictures via a web interface on port 8080.
this required me to move the picture folder from /var/snap/picviewer-kiosk/common to /var/snap/picviewer-kiosk/current, please move your files around after the update …
if you want to use the file manager, point your browser to:
http://<ip of your device>:8080/
to add/remove pictures.
PS: i’m pondering how to make the time configurable too, once this is implemented i’ll actually do a stable release.
Nice! I was also trying to play with a more configurable version of your snap. I was trying to add a snap set picviewer-kiosk duration=15 or something to configure the time a photo is shown. Will open a pull request if I have something that works.
To give you a little background. The goal is a digital picture frame for my grandmother who, given the current pandemic, can no longer see us. Since she has no interest in learning to use a tablet my idea is some kind of server storage (an S3 bucket or something) where family members drop photos. A cronjob could then sync these to the Raspberry (given the limited internet connection in her flat). Now that you wrote the kiosk snap I only need to add a simple crontab to download/remove some photos.
