Question regarding added files

[wormiedk]

My parents have their 50th wedding day very soon. I have set up a picture frame on a raspberry pi in order to show pictures from their life during the years. I have also set up a dropbox folder which guests can upload to from a mobile homepage during the party. I plan for the guest to scan a QR code leading to the "request files" page for the folder.

Every 5 minutes I run a cron script that syncs this folder to the picture frame, copies the files to the displayed folder and empties dropbox again.

The question is then:

1. when will picframe notice the new pictures?
2. will the picframe show the new pictures quickly if I set the recent_n to 1 as all images from the guest are acquired the same day?

[jgodfrey]

Hi @wormiedk,

For #1 - Yes, if the images are just being copied to the frame's local Pictures folder, they should be automatically / dynamically discovered.

For #2 - The new images (as dictated by recent_n) will be "front-loaded" in a given slideshow (1 pass through the image set), but there is 1 caveat. That is, once a given slideshow is built, it will not be rebuilt (with any new images), until the current show completes. So, if you have a long-running show (lots of images and/or a long display time), the new images won't be included/shown until the current show completes and the next show is built.

You can manually force the show to be rebuilt at any time by toggling the "shuffle" property via MQTT or HTTP. In my case, I run in "shuffle" mode by default. So, when I want to immediately see new images (as you describe above), I toggle (twice) the "shuffle" property via my mobile remote. Really, just a single toggle is all that's necessary to rebuild the show, but toggling it twice puts it back in "shuffle" mode (starts with SHUFFLE=TRUE, 1st toggle makes it SHUFFLE=FALSE, 2nd toggle makes it SHUFFLE=TRUE again).

Hope that helps.

**** EDIT ****

All the above being said, I'd definitely recommend that you test/verify proper operation in your situation prior to the event. You obviously have better things to be doing at your parent's 50th anniversary than debugging the frame setup. :)