I am moving into an office. And as any proud husband and father,
I want to have photos of my wife and daughter on my desk. The year
being 2012, I did not hike to the photo shop to get a print framed,
but instead thought to myself that I should put a digital photo
frame onto my table.
This idea exposed me to the ridiculous world of consumer
electronics. It led me to conclude that digital picture frame
designers need to be whacked with cluebats.
Step by step
Once accepted, the thought of a digital photo frame developed
into a product definition along the following lines: my idea photo
frame would connect to my Wifi-network, and obtain the photos
on-the-go from a folder exposed via HTTP or CIFS, and then go on to
display them in random order, incorporating new photos as it
encounters them.
With this in mind, I went to the shops, and since I believe in
specialised retailers and want to support them, my first stop was
Foto Sauter at Sendlinger
Tor. Unfortunately, none of the frames they had came with Wifi, so
I decided to look further. I vehemently oppose to the business
practices of the
Metro group, thus
skipped Saturn and MediaMarkt, and eventually ended up at
Conrad.
They had a frame with Wifi! I jumped for joy, until I read the
manual: pictures can be obtained from Flickr and Picasa.
Period.
All other models on the Internet seem to be similarly limited,
including the new Sony S-frame.
The night before,
Penny had
researched the field a bit and came to the conclusion that the
S-frame would be the best product available. This led me to scratch
Wifi off my requirements list and get a model that would read
photos off a USB stick.
I went back to the photo store and bought a "Sony S-frame", only
to discover that it
cannot show photos in random order. It
has three viewing modes (single photo, collage, single photo with
clock),
and a random mode, but guess what: the random
mode randomly switches the viewing modes, which then display the
photos in lexicographical order.
How stupid is that???
I returned the product and left the store after discovering that
none of their products could do random playback.
I went back to Conrad and found an "Intenso MediaCreator" (what
media does it create???), which displayed the photos seemingly
randomly.
But at home I found out that the "random" order is always the
same, probably because the bright engineer that programmed this
thought it was better to sort filenames by last letter and call it
random, than to figure out a way to roll a dice on the device.
I wrote to the support team and asked them. The response was
that the desired functionality (random selection) is not possible
and won't be made available.
So I am returning the product.
Gah!
Would someone please
tell me about a digital
picture frame (8 inch or so) that can display images in random
order, ideally loading them off a CIFS share via Wifi?
Or is it really the case that consumer electronics are
completely useless these days, by which I mean that "consumers"
have dumbed down so far to buy this crap?
Update: a lot of people wrote in suggesting to
invest in a cheap Android tablet. Some suggested
Raspberry Pis in USB host mode
(emulating the USB stick and hence the source of the images,
provided that the frame doesn't cache). Other suggestions included
the
Samsung SPF-85V which can display images according to an RSS
feed but needs Microsoft for that (or
maybe not), and the
community-developed, Linux-based
Joggler.
Regarding the non-random order on the Intenso frame, Paul
Hedderly postulated that the order comes from the filesystems (FAT
order) and can be changed by writing the files differently.