Slashdot Mirror
A Digital Picture Frame Without the Lock-In?
The Cisco Kid asks: "My mom, bless her soul, doesn't quite get the concept of digital photography. She always complains that we never print them out for her, and gets completely flustered at the idea of looking at them on a computer. I'm thinking of getting a digital photo frame for her, only I can't seem to find one that fits the bill. I am aware of the possibility of building one, and may end up going that way (most likely using a laptop), but I'm really hoping I can find a consumer one that meets my needs — and that's where things get tricky." One of the major features that is required is the ability to update the frame over the network, without the need of any third party software. Has anyone seen a digital picture frame that doesn't tie you to a piece of proprietary software or a proprietary network?
"I'd like to be able to hang it on the wall, and leave it there, so I want to be able to update/add pictures to it over either a wireless or wired network. I've found very few that have networking capabilities, but I can't seem to find any documentation as to what application-layer protocol they use. For example, I've found one that only connects to the manufacturer's website, to which you must subscribe — there is no option to use the network, directly. Kodak seems to only support using their proprietary Windows-only software for controlling or updating their frames (and I don't use Windows).
Is anyone aware of anyone that makes a reasonably priced digital frame that has networking and uses open protocols? Or should I expect to be taking apart the display hinge of a used laptop in the near future?"
Is anyone aware of anyone that makes a reasonably priced digital frame that has networking and uses open protocols? Or should I expect to be taking apart the display hinge of a used laptop in the near future?"
I curse your mother's soul. Damnit! DAMNIT TO HELL!
/me agrees, the religi*** term disturbs me
If you're religishitty, KILL YOURSELF!
I know it's a pain, but there are a few out there with flash memory cards, can't you talk your mum through copying files to a memory card?
It's the best option out there I have seen and know of a few people who have made this work with parents. You could even send her a memory card with photos on it so that she can just put the memory card in and turn it on.
I would throw in a couple of links at this point to different products, but I have no idea where you are, so giving local product is a little difficult..
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
We gave my mother in law a portable DVD player.
The one we bought takes CDs with pictures on them and also takes SD cards
It will run them as a slide show, I assume that will work
You have to be a little carefull how you format things and send the photos to her but it does work and requires no subscription.
http://www.photovu.com/ - expensive but nice. There are others out there.
- picture-frame/
:P
http://www.boyink.com/splaat/comments/diy-digital
Yadda yadda google works wonders for this
I can't wait to goatse.cx all of my neighbor's wireless digital picture frames.
I bought one (Coby, I think) for my own mother last year, and it uses a CF card for storage. You just put all of your pictures on the card and stick it in the back of the frame and it automatically displays them slideshow-style. It has a little remote control you use to configure various settings like slideshow speed, or to just display a certain image or whatever. It has a 7" screen and cost about $70. I just wish it had batteries so there isn't an ugly power cord hanging down the wall or over the edge of the desk.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Its a bit pricy but the eStarling frames have usb/media card and wifi support. You can upload pictures to a flickr, picasa, webshots, etc photosite and click to download them to the frame. They work pretty well, I picked up one for my grandmother and she seems to enjoy it.
I was reading on "Dear Cali" where she talks about a couple of comments. The one that best matched is eStarlings Photo frame at
I know that this doesn't answer the question that you've asked, but why don't you just print them? There are kiosk machines in lots of places now that print at photo quality. Prints are on the order of 20 cents each for a 4x6. I use them. They're great.
Your mom is more comfortable with prints, don't try to force an unwanted solution on her.
My pandigital not only accepts every media card out there, but it can act as a USB mass storage device with its own internal memory. If you really wanted to, you could take a PanDigital (or another frame that acts as Mass storage device), connect it to a single board computer, and.. voila!
Of course, a SBC with USB will easily cost over $50, maybe $100. Even if altogether it costs $200 for the frame and the SBC, thats still probably better than you would've paid for a basic frame even a year ago, let alone how much decent SBC's have dropped in price!
I have no personal experience with them, but the i-mate momento line seems to be somewhat well received. I'm actually in the same market as you, and my feeling on the market is that none of them are actually very good products yet. The market is shockingly poorly developed considering how long digital photo frames have been around. None of them seem to be able to provide even a minimum level of acceptability without some outrageous gaffe. Widescreen on a photo frame? Terrible resolutions? I just don't get it, it's like nobody wants to give a legitimate try to this market.
Take an old notebook PC, disassemble the hinge so you can mount the display front-side-out, put Linux on it, and ta-daa!
The biggest problem for these things---and particularly for digital picture frames with wireless networking---is battery life. Unless you're planning to hook up a power cord wherever you hang it, that's going to be a real pain; backlights take a lot of power. Also, it will never be like looking at a photo because it is a rear-lit display.
What you really want is electronic paper. The technology is in its infancy (despite being decades in the making), but it has real potential to be used for all sorts of things---digital music stands, digital picture frames, digital billboards on the highway without obnoxious lights, etc. Its biggest advantage is that it takes no power except when you are changing it, making it absolutely ideal for what you're doing. Combine that with power-over-ethernet (which would be plausible for such a low power device), and you have a really cool toy. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I usually just upload some pics to Costco and have them ship 'em to my parents. Free shipping, cheap prints. Very easy.
Mom seems to like them.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
(Note, if she has no broadband connection and doesn't have the means to get it, you can set the box up with wifi, have it act as a node, and just log in and upload from your laptop when you swing by.) 2) Attach to it a 15" flatpanel monitor. Get something that would look nice in her home on the hearth or something. You probably won't hang it up on the wall.
3) Use the images swap as an excuse to visit mom. She'll like this. So that you have a maximum amount of face time with her, make sure you use a shell script or make gratuitous use of rsync.
The solution should be preferable because 1) you have control over everything, 2) you know how it works, and 3) mom doesn't have to interact with the computer.
This sig no verb.
I must say, I take exception to this opening. The 'concept' of digital photography is hardly that one must no longer print pictures. In fact, digital prints are fantastic quality and a very satisfying (and, relatively speaking, permanent) way to keep your pictures.
I would say that digital photography's key feature is the replacement of film with a reusable medium, and the corresponding ability to easily transfer and manipulate the pictures stored on that medium. Nothing in that description means that those pictures should not be printed.
Am I alone in finding electronic storage and display of pictures spectacularly unsatisfying? Not only do pictures look worse on a screen to my eye, the non-physical nature of the pictures also diminishes their permanence and impact. Furthermore, storing images on a computer encourages the habit of retaining hundreds or thousands of poor photographs (as there is effectively no cost for doing so) and thereby reduces the amount of time spent considering each photograph in detail and deciding which ones are worth looking at and enjoying.
Read Pynchon.
Just use the photo that came with the frame and SAY you're updating it. When she complains it's always the same photo, say it doesn't work because her multi-LAN CPAN modulator is de-multiplexed or some shit.
Comment of the year
Buy her a 50" LCD TV, stick it on the wall and wire it back to a top of the line surround sound DVD player, then burn everything to JPG on a DVD and stick it in the drive. Get her to pay for it and when she buys the farm you get it all back to watch your p0rn in style!
Philips has a really good digital photo frame:
p hoto+frame&btnG=Search+Products&hl=en
http://www.google.com/products?q=Philips+digital+
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Nothing in that description means that those pictures should not be printed.
TFA: "She always complains that we never print them out for her"
I guess you could say he answered his own question in the second line of the article.
At a certain major retailer, our dept also does the camera sales and related acessories, we have 2 models of digital frames, but they both kind of suck, and its problems inherent to all of them. Both the problems that come to mind are the screen. The first problem is the aspect ratio and is a major problem for every LCD on the market. Since there are only a handfull of manufacturers of LCDs, all brands will use the same parts, because of this 90% of LCD TVs on the market are 16:10 aspect ratio at a weird resolution, same with my main computer monitr, so even if im watching something thats proper 16:9, i still have black bars. This is also a problem for digital photo frames since most of them use a 7" panel thats the same ones used in portable DVD players. In this case, the LCD IS a proper 16:9, but the problem is a "standard" photo is roughly 3:2 aspect ratio. The other problem is again a general problem, the only small high resolution (high pixel density anyway) LCDs on the market are very small, cell phones, PSPs etc, so these slightly larger 7" LCDs have a crummy 480x 234 resolution, so your 3648x2736 10 megapixel image is wasted. As others have said, your gonna have a much better end result from just getting prints.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Vote 1 caitsith01 (606117) for President!
I have been trying to tell people that the medium of transfer is completely different to the medium of displak, and the "digital photography" does not imply that *both* need to change. This seems to be falling on deaf ears, unfortunately.
I hate printers.
It's within the realm of possibility to build one from scratch. Just couple a microcontroller with an LCD display, put a big Li-Ion battery in to power it, and bolt on a USB port. Of course, it would be a real PITA to actually make it work. There are places to order 6" 640 X 480 LCDs from, and a PIC microcontroller should have enough power to display simple JPGs and such. Writing the code would be a pretty hideous undertaking though. Maybe start an open source project for it?
Has anyone had any success running any of these things as monitors? It's bizzare that a 7 inch LCD monitor with VGA input costs more than a 19 inch one. There are situations where a 7 inch monitor would be very nice even if the refresh rate is less than 1 frame per second.
Get one with a card reader, put photos that you " think " she wants on it and give it to her.
Then, sit down with your laptop with ALL of the photos you have ( well, not the porn etc. ) and have her choose what SHE wants.
Explain about cropping, putting text on them, pretty frames etc. If she is willing to use a program to edit the photos herself, get her a basic computer and show her the BASICS. Otherwise YOU do the pretty bits, then GET THEM PRINTED.
You are looking at the pictures as "pretty bits that remind me of something". She looks at them as memories and as part of the person and place the photos are of.
Or, to put it another way, she is the customer trying to get something specific and you are the sales weasel trying to sell her a bunch of garbage she doesnt want or need.
I foolishly purchased this for my mom because the Kodak sales rep said [before I purchased it] that yes, pictures could be sent directly from a Mac to the picture frame over a wireless network. When I actually get the device, it turns out that it only supports pulling pictures [so you have to use the crappy UI on the picture frame to find/select/copy pictures from a remote picture source] and the only remote picture sources it supports is Kodaks picture gallery web site and Windows Media Sharing protocol [which operates 100% independently of Kodak's picture software]. And their picture software, both under MacOSX and Windows, doesn't directly interact with the picture frame at all. You have to export the pictures from the software, manually selecting exactly the right spot to export the pictures to, as it shows up as a generic USB mass storage device. And they botched the USB implementation, because unlike the 20-odd other USB mass storage devices, when you eject the mounted volumes, after a second or two, they automatically remount, and if you don't unplug the device at just the right moment, you get a warning saying the device was unplugged while mounted. I swear, Apple should just make one of these devices and bitch-slap everyone else out of the market.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Over at the Daily WTF, they have an article titled The Complicator's Gloves. Perhaps the submitter of this Slashdot article might want to give it a once over, and if the message still doesn't sink in PRINT THE F*CKING PICTURES OUT JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER WANTS.
Check out iMate MomentoLive. It's not cheap, but pretty cool.
whoa?
Buy a used iMac. Old G4 iMacs for $200 less can be found on the web. (Often sold out, I wonder why.)
No, bite the bullet and start taking that old notebook apart.
The frame is not hard. The ports are right there.
xubuntu.
Customize the screen saver.
Done.
I know my mother's immediate reaction is that she would prefer prints. We've actually had that discussion a few times already. For singular important photos worthy of their own permanent frame that is no doubt correct, but the first downside of your xx cents a copy prints is that they get put away and never looked at again. The second downside is my own convenience as there are still practical limits on how much time and effort I am willing to invest in minor amusements for my mother. So I'm a definite starter for an Apple iFrame the day it comes out, if only as a means of selling her the idea of digitising a lot of her own old pics.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I've seen lots of these picture frames and they all seem to be either USB (yuck!) or SD card (slow as hell) based. Now to me, the ideal solution would be wireless.
Streaming photos from your Gallery2 or Xvids/MP3s from your fileserver just sounds great. Sure you could have some permanent storage like USB-host (for reading USB keys) or built-in RAM for caching (or when the network is down).
I'd love a hackable version, bung Linux on it: wget, NFS, jees even a MythTV frontend!
Of course the easy route would be that old P2 laptop with the busted keyboard but nice 14" screen, but its a bit bulky/noisey for the living room sideboard.....
#include <sig.h>
Furthermore, storing images on a computer encourages the habit of retaining hundreds or thousands of poor photographs (as there is effectively no cost for doing so) and thereby reduces the amount of time spent considering each photograph in detail and deciding which ones are worth looking at and enjoying.
;-) !).
You mean "worth forcing our family and coworkers to pretend to enjoy".
I take pictures as a sort of documentary of my life. I usually look at them when I upload them to the computer, remove the really really bad ones (by which I mean blurry or otherwise unrecognizeable), sort them away into directories by date and location, and then...
I never look at them again!
(Unless I want to consult them for information - for example I've found that, having a poor memory for faces, if I take group pictures at a party or other social event and tag names to them ASAP, by consulting those pics before visiting with the same group of people, I have at least some chance of remembering a few people).
Very, very few of us have any artistic skill whatsoever. Pretending that people want to see 200 pics of our cats/kids/yards/vacations amounts to the basest of conceits. Put simply, your life does not interest me (hell, my own rarely interests me
So, the medium of presentation really doesn't seem to matter, except so far as efficiency goes - And if I really want to look through old pictures, it takes a whole lot less time to do it as a slideshow of digital pictures on a monitor than to dig out the right box, suffer at the massive dust build-up, and then find out that the brand of paper Fuji used 35 years ago turned out to have a fatal flaw leaving all my pics blank. And that presumes the fire/water/rats/bugs didn't get to them first.
I used to use York Photo to process my film several years ago. Good price, good processing, good reliability. I have not used their digital services though.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
Well, see, if you hadn't angered the computer gods by refusing to use your shift key, they wouldn't have smote you in such a fashion. Think about that next time, mmkay?
Well sure, My senior design project was to design and build a digital photo frame. It is in essense a mini-itx motherboard running Linux from Scratch and a GTK-based application that I wrote. Our device did not have a screen but plugged up to any computer monitor you wanted to buy, up to 1600x1200 resolution. I'm certain we could have plugged it into the network and transfered files that way. When we started our project 1 1/2 years ago, there was no competition. We couldn't even find anyone who wanted the darn thing. Now the market is flooded.
And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t
Why not just print them? Seems like a lot less hassle, and people over 40 like hardcopy photos...
My wife went to Costco and bought me an 8" Pandigital frame for my early Father's Day present.
It has 800x600 resolution, a card reader, plays MP3's, and videos (I've only tried AVI's, but it works pretty well)...and it's a USB host and client.
it's pretty slick, and with 128MB of memory, it can hold a LOT of 1024x768...so, I didn't even bother buying another card because after resizing 100 6MP pictures down to 1024x768, I still have over 120MB free.
(I size the pics at 1024x768 so I can zoom in to the pictures if I wanted to)...
Granted, I'll *never* use it for playing music or movies...BUT, I would love to find a way to hack it so I can attach it to my computer and use it as a second display or something...
semper ubi sub ubi
I just finished making one for my friend's mother. Snagged an OLD Hitachi tablet PC - 486/20MB/250MB PCMCIA HD - and installed a slimmed down freeBSD 4.11 on it. Stuck an old WN-B11/PCM wireless card in there and made a nice frame for it.(Actually, asked the neighbouring mall's photo framing shop to make me a NICE frame.) ...
I'm SSHed in right now - she is in Nekarsulm, Germany, I am in Vancouver, B.C. - and am installing samba, so I can mount a directory full of pictures from her Buffalo Linkstation NAS. She is amazed by all this "magic".
For my next similar project I will look for a tablet with more CPU power and built in sound
(One can always do the same thing with a laptop, but taking it apart to "fold" the screen is too much hassle for me. For the tablet all I needed to do is get the frame made.)
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
The one and only logical piece of hardware I can think of for your purpose is an i-Opener. It's a slow PC with little RAM (but it is expandable!) and with 16MB of flash disk which appears as ATA. Thus it's easy to deal with. There's an IDE header in there, but you need to build a special cable to use it or something. There's information about it all over the web. And here is a page about a guy who did it, here is an earlier slashdot story about doing it with linux (which includes some i-Opener info) and so on.
I used my i-Opener with a 3com usb 10/100 ethernet (100Mbps is nice if you have a 100Mbps only hub, which I used to, otherwise the 12 Mbps peak of USB 1.x kind of limits you here) but you could definitely strip down a Linux distribution for it (there are a couple, I think jailbait and midori are the two I've used) all the way to just an X server and wifi utils - then take a USB wifi adapter out of its case, and if you were motivated, even go so far as to put it inside the i-Opener (this is on my list of things to do, I have a linksys WUSB11 whose case broke.)
You can frequently find i-Openers on ebay. And there's probably literally thousands of them in the hands of slashdotters who will never ever do anything with them, maybe you should just put a request in your sig.
If anyone will sell me a number of them at $10 a piece or so, let me know :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...in the May and June issues, the Nisley's Notebook column details the author's adventures constructing a DPF out of a Thinkpad 560Z using entirely free, open-source stuff and minimally-priced accessories.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
My brother for Christmas made a photo book with printed photos for my mom, she was delighted.
Sure, it takes some efforts to select the photos but it's really worth it.