Posted on by Sam

Flickr Screensaver 3.2

Finally – a new version.

My web hosting has been down for a while so I haven’t been bale to post for while.

New Feature:

Authorization: enter your email address and password to give access to private groups and images.
Contacts: display the last 50 (API limit I’m afraid) photos from your contact.
Description: display the title and user at the bottom of the screen for each image.

Fix:
It shoudn’t crash when my web server goes down in the future (if anyone has been having that problem I apologise).

[Download File](/flickr/flickr-screensaver)

33 Replies to “Flickr Screensaver 3.2”

  2. Thanks! I’m so happy to see this working now :). And I think it’s great how you make so many different options available (sets, groups, etc.)

    Just one question: Is the 1-minute-minimum set to comply with API rules, or is there another reason for it? If not, I’d like to request that you make it possible to have the photo changed every [x] seconds :)

    Thanks again for making this neat screensaver available!

  3. huphtur: Forgot to mention that the Flickr screensaver requires the .Net Framework. I’ve sorted this with you already but I thought I’d let everyone else know.

    Adam: The 1-minute minimum is a combination of my own choice, plus not overspamming the flickr servers. If you are wanting more than this you are probably looking for more of a slideshow application, as opposed to a screensaver.

  4. Hey, I’m wondering how often the pictures shown in the screen saver are updated? In other words, if I changed the pictures in the group it’s showing, how soon with those changes be reflected?

    Thanks!

  8. The Flickr API was down for maintenance, so the screensaver stopped working for a while.

    If you have any comments as to what you would like to see the screensaver do in these situation then let me know.

  11. Great program thanks!

    My only suggestion would be a smaller time chakge as Adam mentioned. Maybe like 30 seconds. Just to keed it interesting

  12. Sam, this is very cool! I have been looking for a replacement to the built-in slideshow. A couple of comments and nits:
    1. I notice the apps icon is still the generic .NET icon.
    2. this shows as an app in the tooltray at times. I believe there is a simple setting to avoid this
    3. Any chance of making this code open source (maybe it is already?)
    4. with regard to the 1 minute limit… why not allow this to be user configurable but only pull a new picture. If you don’t have new pictures to show just loop back through the cache until you reach the 1 minute mark? THe more you let the screensaver run, the more photos will be cached and you can achieve the shorter effect without increasing server load.
    5. Transition effects? That would be a nice addition and would also tend to make transitions appear to occur faster.

    Great job, I will happily keep using this.

  15. Downloading private pictures doesn’t seem to work. I put in my email address/password, but it only shows my public pictures.

  16. I’ve not written a screen saver in windows before. I had looked into doing a photo slider last year though.. I was looking for code that would do the Ken Burns Effect for photo transitions, similar to the photo screen saver in MacOSX. Since you’ve got photos displaying pretty well, and idea how much work the burns effect might be?

  18. Marco: try the NTLM APS for getting around the microsoft proxy server. I shall be adding full proxy support in the near future.

    http://ntlmaps.sourceforge.net/

    Wim: Shouldn’t be that hard, although I’m unsure how clean the effect will look (.Net apps don’t do scaling as well as I would hope)

    I am looking at adding different effects and ways of displaying the photos. So far I have a ‘polaroid’ style view working but I’m working on others too…

  20. abstrakone: It should work! Do you have multiple monitors and its not working? Send me an email with whats happening and I’ll take a look.

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  25. Hi Sam, how about seconds instead of minutes? As for scaling, if you draw the image onto a graphics object (Graphics.DrawImage(Image, Single, Single, Single, Single)), you can choose the interpolation mode and get a much cleaner looking image than just resizing the bitmap or image object. See this http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/imageresize.asp

  26. Hi Thom. Yeah, resampling the images is the easy part, its just getting round to the time to do all this stuff.

    I think I am changing the delay to 15 second intervals. Any quicker and it just gets silly (it takes longer to download and display the image than it does to switch to the next image).

    I’m also planning a few experimental ‘display’ preferences, such as a polaroid view. I tried some transition stuff but the .Net framework isn’t great for that (anyone have any hints let me know).

    Sam

  27. Might be an idea to preload images, then hold on an image if the buffer is empty, so the first image will be there for a bit while the buffer fills up. I’ve done some effects in .net using png files to overlay a polaroid style border with shadows and nice blended edges etc. You could also do simple fades by stacking the images on the form and changing the alpha with a timer event.

    Another option would be to use flash, but feeding images to flash can be a pain, it will only load none progressive jpegs, but if you can get that working other people could create SWFs that act as transition ‘plugins’. You could reprocess the images for flash and dump them onto the disk, then just call a function through the flash api to get it to load the next image.

  28. I downloaded the latest version and when I try to enter my Flickr (Yahoo) email address and password, I get an error indicating the the email address and password are incorrect. However if I log into Flickr the address and password work.

    Any suggestions?

  29. If its you’re Yahoo email address and password it wont work – I need to update it to work with the new authentication methods. It will still display your public photos without a email address and password in the mean time however.

    Hope that helps.

  30. I love this screen saver tool. It’s infected my office, everywhere you look you can see people using it.. it’s like they don’t work just so they can see their pictures.

    I took the flickrdotnet you wrote and used it to host my photos on my website:
    Flickr Driven Photo Album

    WackyLabs rocks

  31. I got it working however I installed it on my machine, my father-in-law and my mother-in-law’s machine and it keeps running out of threads? Is there a way I can over come this problem… can you fix it where I can put in my own API key to stop this problem? or something?

    Thanks,
    Nathan

    P.S. I love this app as a way to show new pictures to my family and friends.

  32. Hi. This does appear to be a problem that I have not managed to reproduce. I am aiming on rewriting the bit of code I’m convinced must be the problem but its taking me more time that I had hoped.

    An alternative is to use the older version of the screensaver in the meantime.

    Sam

  33. Hi, thanks a lot for this wonderful program. I use it to monitor the group bestshot and I always look forward to the screensaver kicking in!

    I have a couple minor wishes, if you get the time:
    * I’d like an option that has the program save a list of all images that it has displayed in an earlier session, and never display those again (unless the group has run out of new pictures of course)
    * Sometimes if I don’t like a pic, I hit space to go to the next one. But that behaves strangely; if I hit space again right away, the next image will be displayed only for a very short time. It somehow gets confused with the timeouts.
    * If I go to Configure/Pictures, it always defaults back to “Per User”, even though I had set it to “Per Group”.

    Anyway, these are all really minor. Thanks again!

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