The small form factor of the 7″ official Raspberry Pi touchscreen, makes it the perfect choice to make a table-top digital photo frame. Once you have the project up and running on your PI, you can easily make a 3D printed or wooden enclosure to pimp up your frame and style it to fit with your home decor. You might be lucky and find a perfect fit, wooden frame at your local car boot sale!
This project will work with any screen connected to the Raspberry Pi.
We will be using feh to drive your slide show. This is a lightweight image viewer which has minimum set-up and complications.
sudo apt-get install feh
DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority /usr/bin/feh --quiet --preload --randomize --full-screen --reload 60 -Y --slideshow-delay 15.0 /media/your folder
Your images should now be displaying fullscreen and changing every 15 seconds.
sudo nano /home/pi/start-picture-frame.sh
This will open the nano editor and create a file named start-picture-frame.sh:
We’ll now set it up so that the slideshow starts playing automatically as soon as your Pi starts up. This will enable you to remove the mouse and keyboard, making it a standalone frame.
It is recommended that you enable SSH so that you can control your Pi remotely without the need to attach keyboard and mouse.
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
This will open the following:
sleep 10
bash /home/pi/start-picture-frame.sh &
You can customise the way the slideshow works by tweaking the code that we inserted on step 4:
DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority /usr/bin/feh –quiet –preload –randomize –full-screen –reload 60 -Y –slideshow-delay 15.0 /media/your folder
The commands starting with — are feh options, there are more to play with. You can find the complete list of feh commands and documentation here.
You can start by changing –slideshow-delay from 15.0 to any other value to increase or decrease the amount of time that a photo is displayed.
sudo nano /home/pi/start-picture-frame.sh
This will bring up the script inside the nano editor. You can now edit it from here.
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