Notices

I'm looking for a solution to view/show the internet albums like Picasaweb or Ovi Share. I know that there is browser in the device

Ideal solution would be the Media browser like Mediabox or SiB or even the builtin mediaplayer to offer a button to jump to the web albums on these services like Ovi Share or Picasaweb. During the configuration you feed in the user name and password. After that you just click that button and it will connect and display album thumbnails. From that point onwards the functionality should be similar to the photo browsing in case of the local pictures (zoom/pan/slideshow).

I always seem to have wrong albums loaded in the memory card when I visit people and always they demand to show the pictures of last vacation or this and that...

If I could just upload all the relevant pictures to the right web albums (depending on which one is best integrated with this kind of standalone app on N900), I will never have to fill-up my memory with all the possible pictures! Everytime someone wants to see some pictures, I can just open the app and show them the slide show!

So you're not just wanting an app that gives an improved UI for accessing those internet picture albums, but automatic local caching as well...

What algorithms do you want for picture selection selection and cache management? Most recent? A smarter weighting algorithm that uses metadata such as

• tagged as favorite
• recent photos
• matching tag X, as currently set in preferences
• pictures from just about a year ago (very handy at parties and birthdays)
• Taken near current GPS location
• recently emailed pictures (implies email integration)
• pictures tagged with contact for upcoming meetings
• random set, so that any app doing screensaver picture rotation has a good set of pictures to surprise you with each day

Actually none of the above is needed (not at least now).
The simple album level (in plain file management terms, it could be equivalent of a folder). I know which pictures I want stored under what kind of albums.

I don't need any caching either (or else I would store them on the Micro SD anyway).

The reason I was hoping that it would be a stand alone application is the ease of use. Actually after posting the above request I was playing some music with the Mediabox and I realized that a simple additional icon in the "Storage & Network" would be good enough. It already adds additional icons when there are uPnP sources found in the local network. The same way an additional icon can be added once the device is connected to the net (called say, "Web albums"). Click on that, and you will be presented with a list of the sites that you have registered with. Click on that one and you get the list of albums registered under that service and you will be presented with a list of thumb nails. Next thing is same what you do with the local items. Double click to view full screen and so on.

Has anyone tried to view the Ovi Share pictures with N900? After several clicking on various areas and opening new windows for different operations, each picture takes eternity to load and there are obviously some kind transition effects that takes even longer for the next one to start to load

Basically there are no differences between the web viewing the same things and downloading it through some application like Mediabox. It's the UI and ease of use that makes a whole lot of difference. If I just wanted to store the pictures somewhere, I could as well create a small web server on my home machine and share it through that. The point here is to have a common platform that big players like Google and Nokia (ovi) are offering and make the best use of those to make the usage easy for average users.

Canola (at least for the n810) has the functionality to display photostreams / photo blogs. IIRC there are 4 or 5 streams preinstalled and you can add additional ones (rss feed) in the settings. I think this was originally intended for flickr and picasa streams. Yet, up to now I wasn't able to add a new one.

To make it short. Canola might be the answer to your question. And if you make it work, please tell me how ;)

icke


//Edit// I just realized that Canola is not available on the n900. But as you own a n800 and a n810 you might want to use your n900 just for tethering ^^

Thanks for the reply icke.
Actually I installed the Canola version 2 from the App Manager after reading your post. Seems to work fine OK but still doesn't solve my problem. Firstly there is something called Photocast there. But the links are already fixed and there is no way to add new links there. There is a url field where the cursor just keeps on blinking but you can't get the virtual keyboard OR the HW keyboard to input anything there

Second problem is: even if it allowed to write something, what do I add as the link? How do I add the link to the home of my Ovi Share where all the albums are stored? Or for that matter, even Picasa? How does it know my password?

So I guess, this is meant for more of those public rss type of photo feeds where you can just enter a link and it starts to do the slide show. Not exactly what I wanted. I want the program to log in to Ovi Share using my userid and password and then list out the albums.

The more I look at it, the more I feel that an integration of this functionality should be possible to implement in the Mediabox as it is today. That program has already most of the things in place to enable this. How do I make this request from them?

Hagar,

It seems that I misunderstood you. Sorry. I think its a neat idea to access private photostreams. I think the easiest way to ask for that feature is to file a bug: https://bugs.maemo.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaBox

You probably have to register first.

icke

Done!

A new request has been made using the bugzilla for this kind of interface to web services like Ovi Share, Flickr, Picasaweb etc.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9495

Since this is the first ever bugzilla report done by me, I have no idea what happens next. But hopefully others might be also interested in the similar functionality. Looks like others can vote for this functionality. Please vote for it!!!

Ok, I downloaded picasaweb but have no clue how to use it. Can't even find it anywhere.

There's a picasa plugin for canola in the devel repositories now, you can check it out if you're adventerous, I remember debugging it on the N810 with Andrei some time ago, I wonder how it works on the N900, especially the GPS functions.

Go to settings, sharing accounts, new to create your picasa account. Then from the photo viewer, you can share and select the picasa account.

Frank