Photo broadcasting

[Ephilei]

Has anyone considered modifying Firefly to broadcast photos the same way music is broadcasted? I know iPhoto isn’t a common app like iTunes, but it seems like such an easy step. Unlike music, there’s no need for on-the-fly conversions. And everyone agrees that the AppleTV will act as an iPhoto client the way it streams iTunes once they get around to it.

[rpedde]

@Ephilei wrote:

Has anyone considered modifying Firefly to broadcast photos the same way music is broadcasted? I know iPhoto isn’t a common app like iTunes, but it seems like such an easy step. Unlike music, there’s no need for on-the-fly conversions. And everyone agrees that the AppleTV will act as an iPhoto client the way it streams iTunes once they get around to it.

It really belongs in a separate application. It doesn’t look like a difficult application, but it isn’t rightly part of this one.

That said, if I ever get this thing to a stable state, I’ll probably look at doing a dpap server.

— Ron

[Ephilei]

Certainly the music should take priority (for many reasons). Perhaps a photo app could be a fork of Firefly? Using the same codebase but a different purpose?

[rpedde]

@Ephilei wrote:

Certainly the music should take priority (for many reasons). Perhaps a photo app could be a fork of Firefly? Using the same codebase but a different purpose?

Sure, there’s lots of code that could be shared. Hrm. Well, truthfully, you wouldn’t really *need* a database, as you have to index the images anyway.

The only thing you’d *need* a database for would be if you wanted to do smart playlists or something like that.

You might be able to shoehorn minimal photo sharing in, but to do it right, I think you’d want a separate app. Lots of code could be shared, though.

— Ron

[greenleaf]

A DPAP server for sharing photos over the network with iPhoto is exactly what I’ve been looking for recently. I’ve been wanting to move the main repository of photos off of my wife’s iMac, as she also uses the iPhoto library to store the freelance photography she does, and I’m not really interested in managing multiple libraries. I’d also much rather be storing all the photos on a server with nobody needing to be logged in for sharing to work.

I’ve currently got Firefly Media Server running on the Windows Home Server beta, and it’s working wonderfully, but I’m going to be setting up a linux server soon and loading mt-daap on it. If some work got going on a dpap server to complement the daap server, it would be wonderful. Then I could share my photos the same way I share music, and I wouldn’t have to go spend more money than I can really afford to buy another Mac to run it on.

If I knew anything about programming, I’d offer to help develop a dpap server, but unfortunately my expertise is limited to the hardware side of things. I’ll be happy to get involved in testing if something gets going, though.

[sansp00]

Hey, just jumping in this one …
If you plan on supporting UPnP, should photos be included in FF, thus DPAP?
I have not looked at the code for a while, but would lib UPnP and lib DMAP be ease the implementation pains for protocols and free time for photo support (which is part of the UPnP sharing protocol) ?
Thanks
Patrick S.

[fizze]

Well, I think DPAP would be really really well suited to be a plugin.
I am not sure how extensible the plugin architecture firefly utilizes right now is, but this really seems to be reasonable, here.

[davesanti]

Dumb question here..

Why a separate app of any kind for photo sharing..

I have my photos in the HDD on the Slug…

The HDD is accessible from any computer on the network so I can view the pictures the same way as if stored locally.

I know I am missing something here.. The reason I use FF is because it will serve music to my Soundbridge through the Slug and the HDD… without a PC on.

I would like to view photos without the PC on lets say to mny TV, but you need some head end device ..

Dave

[sansp00]

Dave, I doubt you want to open up your disk access to the net for others to view your pics 😉

Basically, with photo sharing, I could just open up the port for the sharing, just like daap. On top of that, you would not need to rescan all the pics each time you access your hdd, you could add some meta data and browse by criteria, just like with the music.
Patrick S.

[greenleaf]

@sansp00 wrote:

Basically, with photo sharing, I could just open up the port for the sharing, just like daap. On top of that, you would not need to rescan all the pics each time you access your hdd, you could add some meta data and browse by criteria, just like with the music.
Patrick S.

That’s exactly what I’m looking for! My question is, how would the meta data get associated with the pics? I was playing with keywords in iPhoto today, and none of that data showed up when I looked at the picture file in Finder. And adding keywords in Picasa on Windows didn’t show up when viewing pics in Explorer. So I guess those applications store all of that data in their own database files or something. I haven’t messed with any of the Linux-based photo management applications to see how they deal with keywords and stuff, but it appears that there would need to be some sort of front-end application to associate the meta data with the pictures. Or maybe I’m way off and just need to get some sleep.

[Author]

Posts