I wrote the widget. A few questions...

Are the photos in a public album?
Does it play in the virtual chumby?
How many photos are in the album?

it currently downloads all the pictures which is probably the problem. I am just using the small photos from the feed (google offers 3 sizes) so it shouldn't download 34 megs.

You may want to try and create a chumby album with fewer pics. Picasa allows you to copy photos between albums.

cool - good to hear.

jvc,

This widget is indeed very cool and one I had intended to write over the Christmas holidays...  but you beat me to the punch!

I have it working and I like it very much.  The modification you made to progressively load the pics was a nice change to make. 

I only have 1 other request that I hope you could make.  I would love to randomize the pictures that are shown.  I hate having to manage the exact pictures that I want to show in my album.  I would much rather have a single album devoted to chumby that I could just occasionally throw a picture or two into without having to weed out earlier pictures just to make sure it shows up.

Having it randomize which pictures are shown would alleviate this problem and keep us from having to see the same pics all the time.

Thanks so much for your work.

Yes.  Simply shuffling the order of the pictures would be acceptable.

Basically I am trying to ease the burden of keeping the pictures fresh.  I realize that I could go out to Picasa as often as I wish and move stuff in/out of my album.  However, I would much rather just throw a couple of new pics into my album whenever I felt like it and not have to worry about micromanaging the album just to make sure they showed up. 

For example, to make sure any new pics I place in my album show up, I currently have to whittle the album list down to a size that would ensure that all of the pictures have time to show.  Let's say I show the widget for 90 seconds and I display each picture for 5 seconds with a 2 second fade.. that means I might get 10-15 pics to show up and they are pretty much always the same pictures and in the exact same order.  So I would have to manually maintain my list to keep it to that number of pics if I wanted new pictures to show up.  Now suppose that  I wanted to tweak my channel and have the widget go for a longer period of time... or perhaps I want a different channel with nothing but this widget that plays a lot more pics... then I would have to create an entirely new album or something... all of which is more maintenance and more time consuming.

If you could provide a shuffle option then I could simply have 1 album with as many pics as I wanted and not have all these album management issues.

I realize that there would have to be some limit on what you could load.  So depending upon how it is coded I could see that if I had a channel that simply ran this widget "Forever" and I had an album with 100GB if pics, then that might be a problem due to memory constraints.  So maybe you could have 2 parameters to configure instead:

1.  Is Shuffled? (bool)
2.  Max pics to load  (int)

Or better yet, maybe the code could load on pics on demand and try to stay just a few pics ahead of the display.  Then you could free up the pics that have already been displayed before loading the next one.  That way it truly could run "Forever" and show all the pics in the album.

Of course I say all of this without any knowledge of what you have to work with in the Flash/Chumby environment.. just my general programming background.

Heck, while I am at it and I have the author's attention (this is great!)....  I love the feature of touching the screen and moving to the next pic, any chance of coming up with something that would allow you to pause briefly on a pic as well?

Thanks so much.

ok. I updated the widget again (so you may see it go offline again but Chumby has been very good about getting it back online).

The shuffle option is now configurable and the albums should start much quicker. it's turned off by default so you will need to go to the configuration screen.

One other major change is that I replaced by XML parsing routine and I am seeing 5X speedier updates than I had previously.

I'm thinking about the max photos options but I need to put some thought behind how to integrate it. The configuration app is also getting pretty stuffed so I need to   put more time in this before I stuff any more options in..

Enjoy!

If it helps you as you continue working on it, my usage scenario is something like this:

1.  1 public Picasa album with at least 100 pics, possibly a lot more.
2.  My main channel will show the Picasa widget for 60 seconds followed by a couple of other widgets for another 30 seconds (like a clock).

I could configure the Picasa widget as

Photo Duration: 5s
Fade Time: 2s
Shuffle Photos: Yes
Max Pics To Load: 10 pics

In this manner, every time the Picasa widget was shown, I would see 8-9 new random photos from the album.  In my example I have used Max Pics to Load to make the widget more efficient by not loading more than I know will display anyway.  But it could be set to something small like "3", which would give it a different behavior of seeing the same 3 pics several times before the next widget is displayed.

Sorry for the long posts but I hope they are helpful to you... Thanks again!

Spacemutt,

another thing that may solve your problem in the meantime is to add multiple picasa widgets. The "too large of an album" issue will probably show up when the xml is loaded from google as the feed they provide is pretty massive. I have to pull the entire feed per album anyway so putting a max pics option up front won't relieve  this.

As for having 10 gigs of photos, I am just pulling the larger thumbnail they provide not the original uploaded size.

JKing3, I'm going to put the private albums on the to-do list. It looks you can use the auth key that appears in the URL to get access to private albums/pics. Album lists appear to be unavailable this way so configurating it won't be as simple as it is now.

I just tried this widget out for the first time, and it still seems unusably slow on decent-sized albums (the one I tried it with has 266 photos.)

I wrote my own simple picasa widget in OpenLaszlo.  It loads up quickly (takes about 5 seconds for the 266-photo album), and randomizes the photos.  Here's the source if you want it.  What sucks is that I noticed that picasa doesn't have an open crossdomain.xml on their site, so all requests have to be proxied.  How are you dealing with that?

<canvas width="320" height="240">

    <dataset name="photos" type="http" request="true"
            datafromchild="true" cacheable="true"
            src="${'http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/' + user + '/album/' + album + '?kind=photo&thumbsize=320'}">
        <handler name="ondata">
            photoURLs = photos.getPointer().xpathQuery('/feed/entry/group/thumbnail/@url');
            imgA.setResource(photoURLs[Math.floor(Math.random() * photoURLs.length)]);           
            imgB.setResource(photoURLs[Math.floor(Math.random() * photoURLs.length)]);
            LzTimer.addTimer(control.del_timer, 5000);
        </handler>
    </dataset>
   
    <view id="control">
        <attribute name="del_timer"
                value="$once{new LzDelegate(this, 'go')}"/>
        <method name="go">
            if (imgA.opacity == 1) {
                imgA.fadeOut.doStart();
                imgB.fadeIn.doStart();
            } else {
                imgB.fadeOut.doStart();
                imgA.fadeIn.doStart();
            }
            LzTimer.addTimer(del_timer, 5000);
        </method>
    </view>

    <view id="imgA" width="320" height="240" opacity="1" bgcolor="#000000"
            stretches="height">
        <animator name="fadeIn" duration="500"
                attribute="opacity" from="0" to="1"
                start="false" motion="linear">
        </animator>
        <animator name="fadeOut" duration="500"
                attribute="opacity" from="1" to="0"
                start="false" motion="linear">
            <handler name="onstop">
                parent.setResource(photoURLs[Math.floor(Math.random() * photoURLs.length)]);
            </handler>
        </animator>
    </view>
   
    <view id="imgB" width="320" height="240" opacity="0" bgcolor="#000000"
            stretches="height">
        <animator name="fadeIn" duration="500"
                attribute="opacity" from="0" to="1"
                start="false" motion="linear">
        </animator>
        <animator name="fadeOut" duration="500"
                attribute="opacity" from="1" to="0"
                start="false" motion="linear">
            <handler name="onstop">
                parent.setResource(photoURLs[Math.floor(Math.random() * photoURLs.length)]);
            </handler>
        </animator>
    </view>

</canvas>

The XML is 56 KB for the 266 picture album.  I wouldn't exactly call that huge.   A proxy seems to be the only way that I can see to get the picasa pictures served up.  The nocrossdomain.com thing sounds like a cute trick, but I tried it, and my version of Flash (9.0) is smart enough to request the crossdomain.xml from the redirected URL, and still block me from getting to it.  I hope the chumby community isn't sucking up too much of your Dreamhost bandwidth.

Yeah, I had the same thought, so I tried it on the Chumby, but no dice.  In my browser, I can watch Flash tell it to make the request, get redirected, and actually retrieve the data.  However, before it will give it back to me, it sends a crossdomain.xml request to google, and then won't actually return the data to the swf.  It's possible I'm just misunderstanding something, so let me know if you're able to get it to work for you.