Picture browsing in XBMC?

Hi,

Recently I've beginning to think that browsing pictures in XBMC is seriously lagging behind movies/shows or music. I love my movies collection or my music one. I can browse them using really cool skin/views and search by almost any criteria. However, the picture browsing of my photos is somehow simple, move through my photos directories, left and then slideshow... nothing more..

What I am thinking is, would it be difficult to implement some geo position browsing? So a picture view in the skin can show a map on the right showing the position of all your photos (if geo-tagged) and you can browse by position (similar to what picassa does). So for instance you can slideshow all photos from the same city...

Also, maybe with a simple face detection algorithm (from opencv), it is possible to implement a search for specific people in photos. User intervention is needed to tag the face with a name (as doing face recognition might be a lot more hard) and use that info for search/browsing. This is done in picassa actually and I find it very good...

What do you think? Possible to implement? Too much hassle for just doing slideshow of pictures? Or maybe is something way beyond of what a media center should do?

I've often thought that if the EXIF data could be pulled out and put into a database, it would allow some rudimentary library like sorting, by date, iso speed, shutter speed, filesize..

Also for people who put actual useful info in their exif data it would allow searching.

sijones Wrote:I've often thought that if the EXIF data could be pulled out and put into a database, it would allow some rudimentary library like sorting, by date, iso speed, shutter speed, filesize..

Also for people who put actual useful info in their exif data it would allow searching.

Yes, I think that would be the first step, create a sort of "library" for photos. As you said that will allow basic search / sorting. Maybe later, specific things (maybe as addons?) can be added for geo or face tagging

That could be interesting but I suppose it's a big decision for devs since it involves creating/maintaining/updating a new DB for pictures, scanning images for EXIF/IPTC metadata into DB and so on....

I think it doesn't rank very high right now in the priorities list but certainly it would put images in the same level of video/music.

I seem to remember there already being a pictures.db file in the userdata directory.

Does anybody know what details are currently held?

Other things that could be added are..

View picture at a particular zoom level, at a particular position, rotation, cropped??

brighten / darken image.

you wouldn't need to save another picture, but could just apply the same changes whenever the picture is loaded..

picture rating..
slideshow playlists..

smart slideshow playlists based on exif data / ratings..

All out of ideas now, but these could all be implemented with existing code, the face detection, etc would be nice but requires specialist experience.

It's a shame this thread died as Pictures do need a big update.

I've lots of pictures from holidays etc, but I just can't use XBMC to show these to friends visiting as it's too much.

A rating system or playlist would be perfect for this, but the Picture part of XBMC just doesn't seem sexy enough for developers I guess

- EXIF/XMP importing should give all the database stuff you need

- Then you would want to be able to browse and filter by the main categories such as location/camera/year/month/country

- Rating pictures and favourting would be nice

- Then rotating easily with the remote control

- Some slideshow features such as the ken burns effect and slow fades

- Also an "instagram" type plugin could be cool

It is a shame that pictures lag so much in features. I think a huge improvement that would be fairly minimal effort would be to display the date the picture was taken (use EXIF and if unavailable use creation date of file) during the slide show. WMC does this and it makes viewing slideshows of old photos so much more fun to watch because you can place them a lot better when you know the date.

Pretty sure all of that is available to the skin should they wish to display it.