[colug-432] raspi photo display

[Rick Hornsby]

I’ve done some cool and fun projects with the RaspberryPi. I’m trying to turn one into a photo display for a couple of hours long event. The pi just needs to full screen output to HDMI, and will use the venue’s hardware from there. If you’ve ever seen the AppleTV screensavers that display/animate your personal photos (from iCloud etc - not the Apple-supplied flyover one) - that’s the sort of thing I’m looking for. I thought xscreensaver would be the best and easiest.

xscreensaver has a “photo-pile” module, which isn’t great, but would work. Even with pushing the GPU memory to 256MB and turning off as many module options as I can, the animation is insanely slow and choppy on the pi unfortunately. It might just be how it was ported to ARM or something.

I’ve tried to use these as well:

* impressive - some kind of bug where it won’t run properly on the pi?
* photofilmstrip - requires rendering into a video (it’s Fotomagico for Linux)
* feh - seems way more like a dead-simple image previewer than anything else

I could pre-render a video for playback, but I want to use the directory of photos as a source because I may not know or have the full set until go-time. I’m willing to do some configuration, but I won’t want to sit down and have to design a whole slideshow or video.

any suggestions? My backup plan is to just use one of the built-in photo screensavers on my MacBook. They’re perfect, except for the running on my laptop part.

thanks!
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