Software to create a digital photo frame: browse image directories and do slideshows with image panning and cropping on-the-fly
Open Digital Frame is a collection of Python programs and shell scripts to turn a GNU/Linux box into a digital photo frame. It was developed on a Raspberry Pi version 2, so it should run smoothly on very low-end hardware. Any GNU/Linux installation providing the Python 3 interpreter and the Qt5 library should be compatible with this software.
The project consists mainly of two programs: open-digital-frame and photo-reframe. The first one is a directory browser, where the directories are listed into a scrollable window, each with its thumbnail and title. The thumbnail is taken from a folder.jpg file and metadata are read from a folder.nfo file.
If a directory contains a playlist.m3u file and its thumbnail is selected (hit the Return key or double click), the photo-reframe program is started. This program will display each image listed into the playlist, performing panning and zooming on the fly as instructed by the playlist itself.
The directory browser open-digital-frame can be configured as an autostart program, it is also possible to configure a playlist as an autoplay item, so that the slideshow can start automatically when you turn on the system.
- Browse through pictures subdirectories using thumbnails and titles.
- Sort by sorttitle, directory name or data. Each subdirectory should contain a folder.nfo file with the metadata.
- Launch the slideshow if a directory contains a playlist.m3u file (there is a playlist symbol on the thumbnail).
Screenshot of the directory browser.
- Pan and zoom each picture using the geometry saved into the playlist; no need to pre-process the images to fit the screen. Can use different playlists for different screen aspect ratio, eg. playlist_16x9.m3u, playlist_4x3.m3u, etc.
- Optionally show the Exif UserComment over the image as a subtitle.
- Optionally overlay Exif metadata of the photo (e.g. camera settings) over the image.
- Increase or decrease slide time.
- Stop the slideshow to change zoom and pan interactively.
- Update the playlist using the new framing settings.
Slideshow with Exif metadata overlay.
Open Digital Frame was tested on the Raspberry Pi OS desktop, version Debian 12 Bookworm, release date December 5th 2023. Beside the default installation of the operating system, some additional packages are required. Install them as root or using sudo:
apt install python3-pyqt5 exiv2
To download and install Open Digital Frame, execute the following commands as root:
cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/RigacciOrg/open-digital-frame.git
cd open-digital-frame
make install
make install-utils
Several files are copied into the directories:
- /usr/local/bin/
- /usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages/open_digital_frame/
Beside the two main programs open-digital-frame and photo-reframe, some other utilities are provided. They are Python or shell scripts and you can customize them as required.
-
playlist-selection Generate a playlist by tags and dates. Scan the entire pictures tree for folders.nfo an playlist.m3u files, if the nfo file matches the tags or date criteria, the relative playlist is added to the selection. The criteria on tags can be any, all or exclude. The criteria by date can be min, max or year match.
-
photo-info Extract Exif metadata from an image. Its output is used to overlay metadata on the image itself during the slideshow.
-
photo-share During the slideshow you can press F2 to share the image with someone. This implementation requires an email address to send the current image as an attachment.
-
screensaver-off Called before starting a slideshow, disable the scrensaver.
-
screensaver-on Called when a slideshow is closed, to re-enable the screensaver.
A configuration file example is provided: open-digital-frame.ini. Here you can set the root folder containing the pictures, which defaults to $HOME/Pictures/.
The configuration file is searched into the current directory or it is received as the first parameter:
open-digital-frame /home/pi/.config/open-digital-frame.ini
The directory browser of Open Digital Frame searches for a folder.nfo file into each subdirectory. The file is a simple XML file that may contains some tags; these tags are used to compose the thumbnails screen, to sort items and to select playlists to play by tags.
This is an example:
<slideshow>
<title>Libera Università di Alcatraz - Luglio 2012</title>
<sorttitle>2012_07_16_</sorttitle>
<tag>Family</tag>
<tag>Holydays</tag>
<date>2012-07-16</date>
</slideshow>
If a directory contains a folder.jpg or folder.png, that image is used as a thumbnails into the Open Digital Frame directory browser.
The playlist is a text file saved into the directory that contains the images. The default, preferred name is playlist_16x9.m3u, other names searched for are playlist_4x3.m3u and playlist.m3u.
You can set the playlist filename preferences into the open-digital-frame configuration file.
The playlist contains the filename of the images and their respective geometries, separated by a vertical bar, something like this:
IMG_6602.JPG|4000x2250+0+332
IMG_6605.JPG|2971x1671+796+628
IMG_6606.JPG|4000x2250+0+442
IMG_6610.JPG|3810x2143+90+387
IMG_6615.JPG|2828x1590+547+681
IMG_6617.JPG|1633x918+1229+1052
IMG_6624.JPG|2843x1599+393+585
Each geometry determines the portion of the image to be shown in the slideshow, and it is composed by four values:
- width of the crop region
- height of the crop region
- X offset of the top-left corner of the region
- Y offset of the top-left corner of the region
The cropped region is resized to occupy the entire screen.
The playlist file can be created manually, but the preferred way is to use the photo-reframe program interactively: using a keyboard you can cycle through all the images contained into a directory, zoom and pan each photo as required and finally save the updated playlist. Here it is an example:
cd Picture/Holydays
photo-reframe .
The keys to use are:
- F or F11: to toggle full screen
- + or -: zoom in or out
- Arrows keys: pan
- Return: confirm the geometry for the current image
- Space: move to the next image
- Backspace: move to the previous image
- S: save the playlist
- F1: help on keys function
If you re-run the program, the existing playlist is loaded and it is possible to make further changes to it.
When the digital frame is in stand-by (the screen is black and turned off), there is a red light glow around the frame, caused by the Raspberry Pi power LED being very bright, this is particularly disturbing when the room is dark. Fortunately enough there is a way to turn off the LEDs, just add the following snippet at the end of /boot/config.txt and reboot:
# Disable Ethernet LEDs
dtparam=eth_led0=14
dtparam=eth_led1=14
# Disable the PWR LED
dtparam=pwr_led_trigger=none
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off
# Disable the Activity LED
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off