So here’s my situation. I’ve been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order.
I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 – it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting – but it’s not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album.
Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can’t randomize!
Any suggestions? I’m looking to host this on Debian.
Solving it the unix way:
ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -
So it’s ls -1 to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it to sort, with the -R option to sort randomly, then piping the result to sxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it’s available on Debian). For its options : -f means it’s fullscreen, -s f makes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible, -S 5 tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and - is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from the ls and sort commands).
This won’t work for videos, though, only pictures.
