Gallery Remote:Screensaver

Purpose

Most Gallery users create a Gallery to share their pictures with loved ones, and the rest of the world. While the rest of the world generally takes care of itself, loved ones often includes less technical users who find it difficult to go to their web browser and navigate the sometimes bewildering structure of albums and pictures, and often give up.

This screensaver attempts to resolve the situation by letting you install a standard Windows (or Unix) screensaver on those users' machine, which will allow them to admire your pictures without any pain, but also with little control.

The screensaver was inspired by Marcus Popetz, whose parents must be even worse than mine :-)

Downloading

You can download the installer for Windows or the zip for Unix from SourceForge. The code is part of Gallery Remote, and as such is in the main Gallery Subversion repository on SourceForge.

Requirements

On the Gallery

The module should work with Gallery 1, although it hasn't been tested. You should probably use it with Gallery 2, because some of the functionality will be slower or missing with Gallery 1.

With Gallery 2, the Remote module must be enabled.

On the client PC

Java 1.5 must be installed. This is a requirement of the SaverBeans library we use to create the screensaver.

For a better experience, you should also install ImageMagick. ImageMagick will speed up the process of adapting the resolution of downloaded pictures to the screen, and it will also generate better-looking pictures.

Installing

The screensaver is provided on Windows as an installer, so it should be easy to install. During installation, you must leave the SaverBeans Core checked, and you may check either Gallery or GallerEz, or both.

Gallery

This version of the screensaver gives the user control over which album(s) should be used. Before using the screensaver, the user should edit the settings for it to set:

• Gallery URL
• Optionally, a username and password for non-public albums
• Album name or in the case of G2, the Id of the album that should be used for the slideshow. If the rewrite module is enabled, finding out the Id of an album can be accomplished by using Edit Album and looking for the value of g2_itemId in the URL; sorry if this is less than obvious.
  You can also omit the album name, in which case the entire Gallery is used, or you can provide a comma-separated list of album Ids, in which case the slideshow will use a randomly-selected album from the list each time.
• Checking Also show pictures inside sub-albums will do what it says, although there is a limit to how many pictures are downloaded (by default, 200). If the album (and its sub-albums) contain more than the limit, a different set will be downloaded each time.
• Download higher resolution pictures will make the download times longer, but will lead to a nicer slideshow.
• Stretch small pictures will allow the slideshow to show even small pictures full-screen, but those pictures will then appear pixelized. This is a matter of taste.

GalleryEz

This version of the screensaver makes it very easy for people who do not want control. All they need to enter is the URL to a config file. That config file is created by the owner of the album for their family members. Because the config file is reloaded each time the screensaver starts, the owner can update it so that over time, viewers see different albums.

Viewers will still need to edit some settings for the screensaver:

• Configuration URL
• Download higher resolution pictures will make the download times longer, but will lead to a nicer slideshow.
• Stretch small pictures will allow the slideshow to show even small pictures full-screen, but those pictures will then appear pixelized. This is a matter of taste.

The configuration URL should point to a standard Java properties file, with the following properties:

url

URL to the Gallery

album

album names (Ids in G2, see above)

username

(optional) login name for the Gallery

password

(optional) password for the Gallery

recursive

true if pictures in sub-albums should be displayed, false otherwise

The format of the file is documented here. Succintly, each property should be on its own line as:

property_name=property_value

Feedback

2006-10-24 (drasch): I've tried installing this for unix and haven't had any luck. I'm getting NullPointer exceptions after jumping through hoops to get all the pieces in the right places to make xscreensaver happy. Any advice?