In my last post I gave my first impressions of the BT eFrame1000 – a wifi equipped digital photo frame, and I hinted that I’d started to investigate how to exploit a feature that’s intended for streaming Flickr photo albums so that I could view information from other sites. So far, I’ve had some success at cajoling the frame into displaying pictures from sites other than Flickr, and showing news and weather updates. Here’s how…

Background

The eFrame 1000 has a feature that can be configured (via the Windows PC software) with URLs for Flickr photo albums. Once configured, you can go to the frame and select Photos > Flickr > [Album Name] to stream the photos in that album directly from Flickr over your wireless network without needing a computer to be switched on. All references to this feature on the frame, the PC software and in the documentation specifically refer to Flickr and Flickr only (I suspect that’s because Yahoo! (who own Flickr) have a partnership with BT who make the frame and the two companies co-brand some of their broadband products). This feature works because each public album/stream/group on flickr has an RSS url that users can subscribe to in order to see the 20 most recent uploads.

Non-Flickr feeds

A flickr RSS feed contains a link to each image (and a smaller thumbnail version). It turns out that although it’s not a documented feature, you can configure the frame to use any RSS feed that’s in the correct format and the frame won’t care that it isn’t coming from flickr.com. Be warned though, you can’t just take a regular RSS news feed, it has to be a feed where every item contains an embedded image in the same format used by Flickr e.g:

<media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_527112a24e_o.jpg"
type="image/jpeg"
height="1920"
width="2560"/>
<media:thumbnail url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_9178782db5_s.jpg"
height="75"
width="75" />

I haven’t yet determined whether the media:thumbnail tag is used.

Frame Channel

The best site so far has been FrameChannel.com. This is a service designed for wifi picture frames whereby a user creates their own channel by subscribing to “widgets”. It’s intended for framechannel specific frames that will make full use of their API to control slideshow speed, transitions, order etc, but they also provide an RSS feed in a format that works with the eFrame. So, if you subscribe to a weather report, you configure the widget on the frame channel website with your location and then the RSS feed for you channel will contain an image that is created by the weather widget to show your local forecast. Similarly the reuters news widget will generate an image in the feed containing a brief headline and associated picture. The RSS feed is a little hidden away so here’s how you find it: Sign in to your framechannel account. Configure your channel. Go to “My Account”. Copy the feed url that appears just below the tab bar into your browsers address bar and load the feed. Then drag the url from your address bar into the flickr feed url box in the eFrame software and click “Update”  – that will download the configuration to your frame. Then in future on your frame you can go to Photos > Flickr  and you’ll see an album named something like “FrameChannel content for…”.

Other sites

I’ve had some success at finding other sites that work with the eFrame. I’ll keep the list below up-to-date as I find others.

Tick/Cross images from FamFamFam Silk library.

Potential Gotchas

I had a few issues with the PC software for the eFrame in that when I tried to load a feed that it didn’t like, it then subsequently failed to accept any other feeds (even valid ones) and just failed silently without any error message. I had to shutdown the sofware (from the system tray) and restart before it would start accepting new feeds again.

• The “affordable” screens are either very small or very low resolution (or both).
• I run XBMC on my old Xbox so can view every photo I’ve ever taken on the 37″ LCD in the living room anyway.
• Cropping and copying images to a memory card and transferring to the frame seemed like too much hassle.

Frames equipped with WiFi provide a solution to the issue of transferring images to the frame and have been around for a while now but are usually expensive and often tied to a specific photo sharing site or need an ongoing subscription. Enter the BT eFrame 1000 which until recently was £130, but last week I noticed has been reduced to just under £40 (less if you happen to work for said company and get an extra few pounds staff discount, ahem! End of disclaimer). At that price it’s comparable to the run-of-the mill unbranded, low-res screens and I decided was worth a punt. It arrived yesterday and here are my initial thoughts…

Screen quality

At the end of the day this is what really matters – all the fancy features in the world would be a waste of time if the pictures looked awful right?. Fortunately they don’t. The screen 800×600 resolution which is pretty high for an 8″digital photo frame and the images look really great – very crisp, and very bright (perhaps aided by the matt black surround).

Appearance

The matt black frame may not suit everyone (and is quite wide at 1.5″) and is unfortunately not interchangeable. However it’s quite subtle and I’m tempted to try mounting it inside a nice large wooden frame anyway to disguise it further. An added bonus is that BT chose not to emblazen the frame with any logos, graphics or text as many other manufacturers do. There’s a small IR receiver embedded in the surround below the screen for the remote control, 6 buttons on the top edge of the screen for power and menu navigation, and on the right edge is the card reader (CF/SD/MMC/MS(pro)), a USB port (for viewing images on a memory stick), a mini USB port (for connecting to the PC to download images to the frame), and the power connector. One thing I noticed about the position of the power connector is that the power cable sticks out slightly on the right-edge of the frame so is visible from the front – it should really have either been positioned on the back of the frame, or the power cable should be fitted with an elbow so that the trailing cable can’t be seen from the front.

Features

The frame displays photos in JPG format as you’d expect (I haven’t tried other formats) and will play back mp3 audio files. I haven’t tried video yet, but it’s not listed as a feature so I don’t expect it to work. Pictures and audio can be played back from the onboard 128MB memory; from a memory card in the card reader or usb port; and can be streamed from a shared folder on your network (which required the included Windows-only software to be installed). In addition, it can load images from a public Flickr RSS feed (a Windows PC is needed for the initial configuration but after that the PC doesn’t need to be running). I’ve been able to exploit this feature to stream images and news/weather info from a range of other sites (more about that in my next post). One note about public Flickr RSS feeds: because the frame doesn’t log in to your flickr account it can only retrieve public feeds, and Flickr will only return the 20 most recent images in their public feeds so even if you have thousands of images in a flickr-pro account, don’t expect to be able to view more than the most recent 20 uploads.

Navigation

Menus are clear, the UI is clean and consistent with heavy use of a standard icon theme that is appearing on lots of the BT’s websites and products (I’m thinking of the HomeHub and BroadbandAnywhere mobile handsets in particular) and the navigation is generally pretty good all-round. You drill down into menus with the right arrow, use the left arrow to go back and up/down keys to scroll though the current menu (OK to select). The area that really lets it down is the use of the buttons on the supplied remote control. There are 3 menu buttons labelled A, B and C which have different (and inconsistent) functions depending on your current operation: The C button is often used as Cancel  but in a slideshow will rotate the current image rather than quit the slideshow (that would be the left-arrow) for example.

Performance

I haven’t timed any operations or had time to really thrash the frame but it has a generally responsive feel so far. Menus respond quickly, images can be rotated in a couple of seconds (though zooming seems to take a little longer). There are no slick sliding iPhone-esque menus here, but I guess it’s only equipped with a relatively modest processor. Streaming images from the local network or internet feels like it takes a comparable amount of time to what it would take to load the same image on a PC (i.e. the frame isn’t adding noticeable additional delays). It could be faster of course, but it doesn’t feel overly sluggish under normal operation.

PC Software

The PC software is used to configure the frame to view Flickr albums or local network shares and can also be used to copy images to the frames internal storage. Some will complain that the software is windows only, but that’s not been a problem for me. The windows software looks good (slick glass-effect buttons carried over from the UI on the frame itself) but it has a few annoying traits: it’s set to be always-on-top and that can’t be disabled. When you hit the close icon, it only minimises to the system tray. Then when you click to “Manage Flickr Albums” it opens the flickr website in a browser but it’s always InternetExplorer even though Firefox is already running and is my default browser. If I go back and forth between the main menu and the Flickr setup screen, it will open the flickr website in a new IE window every single time.

Hackability

Ok I admit that this is more applicable to me that it would be to the average user of the frame… So far, I’ve tried opening a web browser, an ftp and a telnet connection directly to the frame’s IP address but not had any luck yet. There are a few port numbers listed in an ini file sitting in the application’s install folder which will be my next angle of investigation. My biggest success so far has been in getting the frame to show news and weather reports by configuring it with RSS urls for sites other than Flickr – I write more on this in my next post but I’m quite excited by the possibilities that this could offer. Potentially I could use the frame to read my twitter stream, or local traffic conditions, or stock alerts. Actually I think BT have missed a big opportunity here because they could use the frame in conjunction with their other products – e.g. as a program guide for the Vision TV service, to view a list of missed calls and messages on my landline or to view stats about my recent calls (duration, distance, time of day, cost).

Overall

At this price point it’s difficult to find any serious faults that I can’t live with. Perhaps the biggest let-down is the PC software but once the frame has been set up, I’m unlikely to use the PC software very often anyway. It’s only been 2 days, but so far I’m happy with my purchase.

As with many OU courses there is no instructor led face-to-face training, after enrolling for the course students receive a couple of DVDs with course notes, video tutorials and a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements.  All of the content can also be accessed on the OU website, although the videos are necessarily of lower quality which make the Photoshop tutorials difficult to follow. The course currently uses Elements version 5, which is not the latest version (version 7 will be released shortly) but is more than adequate.

Each week students must read the notes for that week and watch the video tutorials which are generally a narrated recording of an instructor demonstrating a Photoshop technique – for the first couple of weeks one of the instructors had a slow monotonous voice that made the videos difficult to follow but this improved greatly with the instructors in later weeks. There’s then a practical exercise each week where students must submit a minimum of two but up to ten photos electronically using “Open Studio” (an online photo sharing site similar to flickr or picasa) for fellow students to critique. There’s no formal feedback from instructors, although there are experienced moderators who may also comment on students’ work.

The OU say that any camera may be used for the course (2 Megapixel or above if it’s digital) and that an SLR is not required. However, I would say that a digital rather than film camera is essential as it would be too difficult to take a whole film of photographs each week in order to have it developed and digitised in order to submit pictures for that week’s task. I’d agree that an SLR is not essential (lots of my course mates were using compact digital cameras) but a camera with some level of manual settings is a must.

There were a couple of things that I thought could be improved with the course: one subject that I expected to be covered but wasn’t was flash photography (diffusers, slow sync, front/rear curtain).  I also felt that the topics were a little weak in the last couple of weeks – almost as though they had struggled to find enough material to fill the full 10 weeks, although I think the OU would argue that this was to allow students that may have missed earlier topics to catch up before the final assessment. Finally, although the Open Studio website was very well designed, the accompanying forum was non-intuitive and amongst the worst I have ever used. In fact I suspect that many students (myself included) didn’t use the forum because it was so poor choosing instead to have conversations using the commenting system in Open Studio or moving on to the T189 group on flickr. However, I know that this was only the second time that the course had been run and that improvements are being made to the online systems.

Overall I found T189 to be a very rewarding course and my fellow students provided encouragement and useful tips. I know understand concepts like depth-of-field and could even tell you what (most of) the abbreviations and funny little symbols on my camera all do! The weekly tasks are great because they give you a reason to go out and take photos each week My confidence and the quality of my photos has certainly improved as a result. – I might have found this more difficult if I had done the course in October: there are only so many pictures you can take in a grey and rainy Suffolk! Before I completed the course I would take photos save them to my computer and tag them, now I find myself cropping, straightening, tweaking the levels, adjusting the colour balance, cloning out distractions, sharpening, dodging, burning…

There’s a mid-course assessment (multiple choice Q&A) and at the end of the course, students must submit a panel of 10 photographs and submit a written piece to answer a selection of questions about the photos they submit. I believe that students then get a pass or fail along with a score (I’ll find out at the end of the week when I get my result!) and those students getting the higher results are encouraged to work toward Licentiateship Distinction at the Royal Photographic Society.

The autostitch software is the result of a research project at the University of British Columbia and the technology has been licenced to other companies for use in commercial products – it’s even been licensed to George Lucas’ ILM for production of panoramic images for films. The free version has a quite a clunky interface with a bit of a “proof-of-concept” feel about and although it provides a ton of options for customisation the only think I ever change is the amount of memory that the app can consume (I usually allocate all the physical RAM in my PC), and the size of the output image (larger images take considerably longer to produce). The app itself is only 0.75MB to download, requires no installation and when the trial period expires just download a new copy!

The example images here are my own very basic efforts. For some really impressive images checkout flickr for images tagged with autostitch: flickr.com/photos/tags/autostitch

I have no association with autostitch other than as a user of the software.

www.autostitch.net