Home digital picture frames network

Question

I am looking to put up more than a few digital picture frames throughout the house. Although I am also looking for specific frames to use, I am asking here about what options there might be to achieve the following (as many as possible):

1. Manage a library of pictures
2. Tag pictures with categories or people's names
3. Store list of available digital picture frames. For example, "Living Room North Wall", "Over the Mantle", "Stairwell", etc.
4. Store sets of pictures to display. For example, "Everyday Pictures", "Holiday Pictures", "Family Pictures", etc.

The end goal is to have either static or cyclical sets of pictures that would display throughout the house, with specific sets for specific frames, that could be categorized/specified from a computer on the network.

Does this exist and is there a name for it so that I can more effectively search for it?

Answer 1

The answer would depend on the functionality of the picture frames and how they connect to each other.

From a practical POV you probably want to get picture frames which are network enabled, and then use [Windows] file sharing (SMB/SAMBA/CIFS/Windows File Sharing are all pretty much synonyms when looking for the frames).

It would then be a matter of setting up an SMB fileserver, arranging the files in an appropriate file structure/hierachy and pointing the various frames at various hierachies. You can probably use symlinks to extend this functionality (or, if you are using Linux or similar and knowledgeable, union filesystems or similar).

This does, however, require that the file server is up and contactable, and that the connectivity to each frame is solid. If this is not the case, you might want to ensure each frame runs files from a known place on its local file system and write a script to manipulate the contents of this filesystem. You probably want to statically assign IP addresses to each frame so you know how to address them. This solution is not as scalable, and is a lot harder to write.

Answer 2

Because I use this setup at work, I immediately think of a digital signage solution - a free one (budgets are tight at work) which works well enough with elderly or cheap hardware - specifically Concerto (not associated other than as a user.)

That assumes you are willing to use a "digital picture frame" that will run Debian (well, some folks run other systems - I find Debian the least trouble) which won't (as far as I know) be an off-the-shelf DPF. But it can be a display connected to a Pi, or to a computer that is past updates (though there you have to be careful, as if you get too old the power bill will be enough to afford something newer and less power hungry.) Some tablets would also work, I believe. The machines speced at http://www.concerto-signage.org/deploy are all far above what I actually use in production (I don't run their "Player" - I just have a browser in kiosk mode running.)

There are plenty of non-free "digital signage" solutions, but they are very non-free, so unless your budget for this is higher than one would expect for a home project, probably not an option. But if you are a high-budget operation, there's plenty of options.

It has all 4 of your points, in some way, but how you'd be able to do 1 & 2 on the stock software is probably not what you are thinking of, at a guess. But there are ways to do those things - I just suspect you are looking for a method which allows more manipulation based on them than I'm aware of being built in. You could of course, write something that does what you want and submit it to the project, but that assumes that you want to get under the hood.