So here’s my situation. I’ve been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order.
I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 – it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting – but it’s not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album.
Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can’t randomize!
Any suggestions? I’m looking to host this on Debian.
Solving it the unix way:
ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -So it’s
ls -1to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it tosort, with the-Roption to sort randomly, then piping the result tosxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it’s available on Debian). For its options :-fmeans it’s fullscreen,-s fmakes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible,-S 5tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and-is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from thelsandsortcommands).This won’t work for videos, though, only pictures.
beautiful solution
Probably nobody’s first guess, but Plex can do this, no problem. It’s quietly robust.
I’ve actually used Plex for this before, but I was looking for something simpler. Good call, though!
Take a look at Photostructure… I think that will meet your requirements!
Looks good, here is a link for everyone Photostructure
you can use qiv , it’s in the repos
Photoprism can do random slideshow in the library/browse?order=random endpoint
https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/commit/47defc861c17ca1348eb0193b9ea84ce2708f228
You didn’t say anything about price, so I’m going to offer Chevereto.
If you want slideshow on android device, there is an app on gstore called photocloud. It can play from shared folder or nextcloud for example. Looks outdated but it has features you want. There is a downside tho
Pricing
Pricing: free version shows a “please purchase” images once a while during the slideshow. There is an in-app payment which removes these images. Another payment unlocks the “Daydream” functionality; this only works on Android 4.2 and higher, don’t purchase if you have Android 4.1 or lower.
Not exactly what you asked but it might be usefull
