[RELEASE] iPhoto Plugin Addon for XBMC

(2012-03-26 17:11)nunz56 Wrote:  Any way to get ATV's "Floating Photos" feature to work with the skin's screensaver? I guess that would be a screensaver development, not an iPhoto?

Correct, that would be a screensaver. It's very likely one could be written that supports crawling my plugin for photos, but I personally have no experience writing screensavers.

It might also be possible to disable XBMC's screensaver and use the system one instead? I don't know though.

-j

I just moved most of my userdata folder (database and thumbnails in particular) over from a Mac to an ATV2. I'm trying to sort out a few remaining issues and one of them is with this (excellent) plugin.

So a few questions:

1. how do I purge the data that was carried over from the Mac, including the thumbnails?

2. assuming I manage to add my iPhoto library on my Mac using afp:// (have not yet tried due to #1 above), will importing the library import original size photos or just thumbnails or what? Obviously I'm concerned about storage space on the ATV2 in a way that I wasn't on the Mac!

Thanks.

(2012-04-20 22:54)ctawn Wrote:  I just moved most of my userdata folder (database and thumbnails in particular) over from a Mac to an ATV2. I'm trying to sort out a few remaining issues and one of them is with this (excellent) plugin.

So a few questions:

1. how do I purge the data that was carried over from the Mac, including the thumbnails?

From the context menu inside the plugin you can tell it to purge the database and to purge the map files it cached.

Purging the database is really kind of useless in your case though since it gets rewritten entirely whenever you import your library -- the option is really there as kind of a failsafe in case something odd happens to the database that prevents the plugin from working at all.

Purging the map files might be useless as well since you're still pointing to the same iPhoto library (they should all still be valid).

Thumbnails are handled in XBMC itself. Unfortunately there is no easy way currently to tell XBMC to clean out the Thumbnails folder of unused images. Your only easy option is to delete the folder entirely and have XBMC regenerate all of your thumbs currently. I believe there is a utility someone wrote for Windows that will purge unused thumbs from the folder, but I haven't personally used it. That said, since the iPhoto library itself hasn't changed, the thumbnails it cached should still be valid anyway.

My plugin doesn't store any of your images locally. When you select Import Library it is actually just scanning your AlbumData.xml file and storing information and references to your actual images in a local database. My current database is 1.4MB and I've got 4000+ photos.

In short: you don't really have to do anything for my plugin when you move it to another machine. You can even omit copying the files from addon_data and it will just reconstruct it all the next time you select Import Library.

(2012-04-20 22:54)ctawn Wrote:  2. assuming I manage to add my iPhoto library on my Mac using afp:// (have not yet tried due to #1 above), will importing the library import original size photos or just thumbnails or what? Obviously I'm concerned about storage space on the ATV2 in a way that I wasn't on the Mac!

As noted above, it doesn't actually copy any of your images to the local filesystem. The thumbnails are cached by XBMC, but there is nothing you need to do within my plugin to save space.

To give you an idea, on my library of 4000+ photos, my plugin utilizes a total of 1.5MB of space on the local filesystem.

-j

Thanks for the info. Actually the Mac I will link over afp:// is a different Mac than the one that originally ran XBMC, and thus has a different iPhoto library. But I'll try what you suggest. Thanks.

What skin is that on the first post he use and shown his iphoto plugin?

The skin in the screenshots is Metropolis.

I have error when updating library:

It looks like it's having trouble reading from the SMB share. You could try connecting to the share in your OS and see if you can open the AlbumData.xml file by hand. If it works, it may be a quirk with XBMC's SMB functionality, but it's not likely that my plugin is the culprit here.

Hi!

Thanks for such a wonderful plugin ;-) I'm having problems running it on my Macbook Pro (OS X Lion). The plugin seems to be working. I successfully imported the library, but every time I open a pic I get a black screen, nothing loads. I get all the file names, proper folder structure and all that, but pictures won't open. Any ideas?

Thanks

(2012-06-22 12:20)MarceFX Wrote:  I'm having problems running it on my Macbook Pro (OS X Lion). The plugin seems to be working. I successfully imported the library, but every time I open a pic I get a black screen, nothing loads. I get all the file names, proper folder structure and all that, but pictures won't open. Any ideas?

Please enable debugging in XBMC and re-import the library (Update Library) from within my add-on. Navigate to one of the pictures that won't load and then send me the resulting xbmc.log file.