Raspberry Pi Digital Photo Frame

asechrest

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asechrest
Howdy, folks. Hoping to enlist the help of some Linux users. I'm planning a little tech project for me and the kids. My background is as a hobbyist and Linux Mint user (probably not even an intermediate user). I've already built a media center from the Raspberry Pi B+, so I've got a touch of experience with it.

My idea: create a digital photo frame from an old computer monitor and a Raspberry Pi (probably running Raspbian). There are lots of walk-throughs of this online, but I'd like to make it simple and do my own thing. I'll have the monitor mounted in a real frame on the wall, and the Pi will be wi-fi connected to a shared folder on my desktop, and will run a slideshow from the photos in that folder.

Tonight I was running some software proofs of concept using my Linux Mint desktop to serve as the Raspberry Pi and my Windows desktop to run the shared folder. I was able to successfully share and connect to the shared Windows folder from my Linux machine. I was also successfully able to command-line run an Eye of GNOME slideshow based off of the contents of said folder. (gThumb also works, but EOG is cleaner and easier to run from command line.) This is seemingly a really elegant and simple solution. Just run EOG off the shared folder. It should be easy to set up an auto-run script to do this and just have the photo frame constantly running. BUT...

PROBLEM 1: A slideshow running in EOG or gThumb will not auto-update the slideshow when the contents of the shared folder change. Since my girlfriend and her kids will likely be handling the picture updating, and I want the actual photo frame to be as hands-off as possible, I really need the slideshow to update when folder contents are changed, so that they can add or remove photos from the folder and see the photo frame automatically update with the new set of photos.

For now I'm running a workaround structured liked this one. And it actually works fairly elegantly, but it requires running a constant while loop.

Does anyone know how to get an EOG or gThumb slideshow to auto-update the selection of photos when the folder contents have changed?

Thanks in advance!
 
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