Looking for slideshow software with a twist

[casualsax3]

Is there any slideshow software out there that well let you add images to the slideshow after you've already started it?

My friend has an idea for his wedding where he's going to have a camera going around and transmitting pictures back to a laptop. He's looking for some sort of slideshow software that will be able to realize that there are new images in a folder, and then move on to them after it completes the initial batch.

For example, while it's showing pictures 1-10, pictures 11 through 15 are added. Ideally when it gets to 10 it will just continue on through 15.

After that I suppose that it could loop, though it would be cool if it just sat on 15 and waited for you to add 16. Gnome's default image viewer lets you add images after the slideshow has started. Does anything like this exist in Windows? The camera software requires Windows unfortunately.

[kick]

Get XnView MP from here:
ftp://ftp2.xnview.com/xnview/misc/XnViewMP-win.zip (Windows)
ftp://ftp2.xnview.com/xnview/misc/XnViewMP-linux.tgz (Linux)

and if it still doesn't have such a feature,you can post your feature request in the 'Suggestions' forum:
http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewforum.php?f=34

The author of this wonderful free app is open to feature requests of any kind

[casualsax3]

Whelp I ended up just writing it myself.

Imagemagick turned out to be just what I needed. Basically I had the camera saving to c:\pictures, and then ran Ubuntu in a virtual machine on top of it, accessing c:\pictures via Samba.


Here are the scripts. This first one takes 4 random pictures and stitches them together:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

SOURCE=/media/pictures
WORKING=/home/user/Pictures
DEST=/home/user/Pictures/slideshow
RESOLUTION="864x574!"

cd $DEST
passnumber=`ls -t *.JPG | head -1 | cut -f1 -d. | sed s/photo//`
echo "First photo is $passnumber"

while true

passnumber=`expr $passnumber + 1`
echo "Pass number $passnumber"

do
	pictures=`ls $SOURCE/*.JPG | shuf | tail -4`
	echo "working set of pictures: $pictures"
	finalpic="photo${passnumber}.JPG"
	echo $sourcefilename
	echo "Resulting picture will be $finalpic"
	/usr/bin/convert -resize $RESOLUTION $pictures $WORKING/resized.JPG
	/usr/bin/convert $WORKING/resized* -append $DEST/$finalpic
	#Uncomment to convert images to gray
	#/usr/bin/convert -colorspace Gray $DEST/$finalpic $DEST/$finalpic
	echo "Picture processing complete.  Next picture will be generated in 30 seconds"
	sleep 30
done

Here is the result:

The aspect ratio is a bit off in this sample.

I also put together this script for showing them:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

SOURCE=/home/user/Pictures/slideshow

while true
do
	pictures=`ls $SOURCE/*.JPG`
        /usr/bin/qiv -F $pictures -f -m -i -s -r --slide --delay 10 & VIEWERPID1="$!"
	sleep 10
	kill $VIEWERPID2
        sleep 5m
        pictures=`ls $SOURCE/*.JPG`
        /usr/bin/qiv -F $pictures -f -m -i -s -r --slide --delay 10 & VIEWERPID2="$!"
	sleep 10
        kill $VIEWERPID1
	sleep 5m
done

This utilizes QIV. I spawned a second instance before killing the first to guarantee that there's always an image showing.

[doktor_kris]

Well done!