(2013-02-12, 00:31)NotGrounded Wrote: I’m pointing to a picture folder with my entire digital image collection from the past 15 years. In total 77K images organized into a three level folder hierarchy. The startup time for Slideshow Screen saver is about 3-4 minutes with the spinning icon to get going while it appears to traverse the file system collecting all the filenames to work with. Once it is running everything looks gorgeous. I’m sure the performance is made a lot worse by having everything located on a NAS. Any ideas on how to speed things up? It would be great if it could start instantly in displaying at least some pictures. Maybe something like caching a list of all the filenames once (or periodically) that could then be loaded quickly on start-up each time?
i'm not sure how to handle this to be honest.
i don't see a way to display an initial set of images while the addon is still scanning all directories.
caching would be possible to implement, but it would require quite a bit of additional code and settings:
1) it needs to be optional, as it's not useful for the majority of users
2) find a way to create the initial cache
3) how / when to update the cache
4) it probably needs a way to delete the cache as well i think
if anyone has a brilliant idea on how to implement this without affecting users who don't need this
and without adding a bunch of additional settings or hard to maintain code,
i'm open to suggestions.
(2013-02-12, 00:31)NotGrounded Wrote: The pan and zoom effect is a nice way to keep in more interesting. If anyone is feeling really ambitious, the Windows Media Center “Play Pictures” visual effect is really spectacular when you have a large collection of images. It has a really attractive way of displaying your collection at a higher level and then panning/zooming to specific images, including rotating a small set from picture of the same day. The use of coloring the picture in focus and using black-and-white for everything else is quite clever. There is someone who put together a Windows Screen Saver version that emulates the functionality of this WMC slideshow feature (http://www.photoscroll.net) that you could take a look at for an example if you don’t have WMC. If this visual effect could be implemented it would really enhance the photo capabilities of XBMC.
i'm not feeling ambitious :-)
maybe someone can turn that one into a separate screensaver.