GLoSS - Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer now available
KevinRea
Joined: 2006-09-13
Posts: 17
Posted: Thu, 2006-10-12 21:41
I can't explain it, but things just started working. The installer now works; Microsoft weirdness. On a seperate subject, I've noticed that sometimes GLoSS seems to get confused about re-sizing the pictures for display. I have it configured to re-size large images to fit an to leave the smaller images alone. Sometimes the small images are stretched to fit the screen and sometimes they are not. Sometimes the large images have been blown up so only a portion of them is visible. This seems to be an intermittent problem and only happens occasionally. Anyone else experienced similar symptoms?
Kevin
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Thu, 2006-10-12 22:13
KevinRea wrote:
I've noticed that sometimes GLoSS seems to get confused about re-sizing the pictures for display. I have it configured to re-size large images to fit an to leave the smaller images alone. Sometimes the small images are stretched to fit the screen and sometimes they are not. Sometimes the large images have been blown up so only a portion of them is visible. This seems to be an intermittent problem and only happens occasionally. Anyone else experienced similar symptoms?
Could it be that you've got your Windows Desktop settings set so that desktop images are "stretched"?
I know that's caught the odd other person out.
Other than that, no, I've never noticed similar behaviour myself.
Dunno if you'd noticed, but I just released version 1.1, which fixes the odd bug, and adds the ability to upload JPEGs to Gallery.
It's both the desktop and screensaver that behave in this way occasionally, and it doesn't seem to be related to the Window's XP configuration items.
I did notice, however, that if the Window's XP configuration for the screensaver is set to "On resume, password protect", then GLoSS's feature to not start the screensaver when a particular program is "active" does not work. When this option is not selected, everything works as advertised.
I am running GLoSS on a Media Center PC that is in my living room, and I'd like the screensaver not to start when I'm using it to watch TV. This works fine as long as the screensaver is not configured to display the welcome screen on resumption. In addition, I control my kids access to the TV by requiring a password to be entered. So ideally, once we've finished watching TV and closed the Media Center application, I'd like the GLoSS screensaver to kick in after a few minutes and require a login to access the computer after that.
Kevin
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Thu, 2006-10-19 19:17
KevinRea wrote:
It's both the desktop and screensaver that behave in this way occasionally, and it doesn't seem to be related to the Window's XP configuration items.
Strange. I wonder if it could be the values that Windows gives me for the screen size and desktop size (e.g. screen size is the resolution your monitor is set to, and desktop size includes the desktop that stretches across dual monitors etc). I wonder if Windows is giving me different values at different times on a Media PC? I have no idea.
Quote:
I did notice, however, that if the Window's XP configuration for the screensaver is set to "On resume, password protect", then GLoSS's feature to not start the screensaver when a particular program is "active" does not work. When this option is not selected, everything works as advertised.
I am running GLoSS on a Media Center PC that is in my living room, and I'd like the screensaver not to start when I'm using it to watch TV. This works fine as long as the screensaver is not configured to display the welcome screen on resumption. In addition, I control my kids access to the TV by requiring a password to be entered. So ideally, once we've finished watching TV and closed the Media Center application, I'd like the GLoSS screensaver to kick in after a few minutes and require a login to access the computer after that.
So if I understand correctly, you'd like a feature added to GLoSS so that GLoSS asks you for a password, and then you can turn off the Windows built-in "On resume, password protect" option?
I'll look into it and let you know.
Well if it just worked properly when the Windows built-in "On resume, password protect" option was selected that would be best.
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Thu, 2006-10-19 21:01
Without looking into it any more closely, I suspect that would require some major work on my part. Whereas, it's only taken me 5 minutes already to add a "Lock Workstation" option to the GLoSS configuration dialog for the screensaver, and explicitly lock the workstation after the screensaver ends if that option is selected - this means it's still the same username and password as you use to log on to the PC, you don't need separate details for GLoSS.
I trust that will be an acceptable workaround for you.
Just need to do a bit more testing on it, and I'll upload a new version for you.
Hey there I've been keeping up with all the changes. I love them all. I have one request. All the stuff that comes with the desktop changer like the taskbar item for quick config, the auto update, the screensaver shortcut is fantastic but to be honest I can't use the desktop changer part. When it's running I don't see any of the desktops it changes because I utilize the active desktop heavily with content and stuff (I don't care what anyone says, if used right it friggen rocks). Since I use a web based active desktop I don't even see the REAL background that is changing. So now with the request. Can you setup an option to disable the desktop changer part but still use all of the other goodies that come with the desktop changer?
Stephen
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Mon, 2006-10-23 22:50
Hey there,
Long time no see... ;-)
SuicideDog wrote:
Can you setup an option to disable the desktop changer part but still use all of the other goodies that come with the desktop changer?
How does the following sound?
I could add another item to the "Refresh Every..." combobox of "Disable" or similar, and if selected, then the desktop image never gets changed (and any related functionality gets disabled).
I'm a bit confused though - surely it's pretty much just the auto-update feature in the Desktop Changer that you really use then?
I use the upload feature, the screen saver shortcut, the auto-update feature and I sometimes use the screen saver configuration when I want to change it up. The Disable option would be primo! Thanks again for all the hard work!
Stephen
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Tue, 2006-10-24 00:27
SuicideDog wrote:
I use the upload feature
Ahhh, it's so new, I'd forgotten about that bit... ;-)
I wrote like a three page comment and then the friggin thing got lost cuz I closed the wrong browser. So I'm now going to just summarize it again and give you the quick and dirty.
Request for advanced caching
Online mode:
-Get which picture to display from site
-Check primary cache location if not present goto next cache location
-Check secondary cache location (I would love to be able to specify like 4-5 ) if picture is there transfer to primary location
-If not cached grab from website and put in primary cache. (the idea is that if one computer grabs it then the rest should be able to get by checking it's peers first even if that cache is on a laptop with a share)
-Display picture
Offline mode:
I'm not sure exactly how the offline mode works but I would like it to have the same functionality
This is primarily to address my laptops that I want to have a local cache instead of a shared cache but yet still have the ability to grab the picture from a shared cache rather than the web.
If you are wondering.. yes I do run this on that many computers that it would make a difference. I have seven computers at home (2 picture frames) and 4 at work that run this. Of those 11 computers 4 are laptops. Between me the wife and kids we use all of them. I also have about 6000 pictures on my website, and that number keeps going up. I can live without the caching stuff but it would be nice.
Stephen
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Tue, 2006-10-24 19:28
SuicideDog wrote:
Request for advanced caching...
I'll have a think, but I wouldn't think that's too hard to do. Should be relatively straightforward for online mode.
Offline mode is not as simple. When offline, GLoSS just pulls random images from all the images in the cache, so it's not as if I can pick a random image name out of thin air and then see if it's in the primary cache. GLoSS doesn't keep a list anywhere of all the image names in your Gallery. I'm not quite sure how to handle things here...
But at least if I added the requested functionality to online mode, then your caches would be a bit fresher anyway?
I figured thats how the offline mode worked. Random pics from local cache only would work. If you wanted to get fancy you could randomize what cache then randomize a pic from that cache.. but I don't think that would work all that great. I'd just do local cache only when offline.. kinda makes sense also that if in offline mode you prolly don't have network access.
Stephen
SuicideDog
Joined: 2006-01-10
Posts: 35
Posted: Tue, 2006-11-14 23:48
It's been a couple weeks so I decided to hit you up and ask if you had made any progress on the whole caching thing.
Stephen
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2006-11-15 00:44
SuicideDog wrote:
It's been a couple weeks so I decided to hit you up and ask if you had made any progress on the whole caching thing.
Noooo, sorry, I haven't.
I've been taking a bit of a short break from GLoSS (and it's another holiday weekend down here in NZ this weekend), but I'll try and get back into it soon after that.
How does the following sound?
I could add another item to the "Refresh Every..." combobox of "Disable" or similar, and if selected, then the desktop image never gets changed (and any related functionality gets disabled).
I'm in a bit of the same situation where it would be really nice to have the option to disable the desktop changing, but still have all of the other features available. Just wondering if this request got lost up there.
Tim Musa http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Mon, 2006-11-27 04:26
opel70 wrote:
conorboyd wrote:
How does the following sound?
I could add another item to the "Refresh Every..." combobox of "Disable" or similar, and if selected, then the desktop image never gets changed (and any related functionality gets disabled).
I'm in a bit of the same situation where it would be really nice to have the option to disable the desktop changing, but still have all of the other features available. Just wondering if this request got lost up there.
Nope, it's still on the list, I've just been a bit busy with my "real" job lately, but I'm starting to get back into GLoSS a bit more now.
I'll look into doing this for you guys next, but I've also got my eye on the changes coming up in G2.2 around the Remote Protocol. I'm hoping this means I can move away from relying on the Image Block to serve random images, and instead use the Remote Protocol directly to give me random images. This would also mean I would then be able to tie images displayed in the screensaver directly back to the image in your Gallery. One of the early requests for GLoSS was the ability to be able to "click" on an image that had been shown by GLoSS and go to that image's page in your Gallery. I should be able to do all this and more if my reading of the upcoming Remote Protocol changes in G2.2 is correct.
It would be really nice to have the option to disable the desktop changing, but still have all of the other features available.
Okay, I've got this done. All I've done is add an extra value of "Disable" to the "Refresh Every" combobox, and if the current setting is disabled, then GLoSS will not automatically update your desktop every X minutes. I've left it so that a GLoSS user can still manually choose to update their desktop, as I really can't see the benefit of disabling everything else, but at least it means if you don't want it to change your desktop, then the desktop changer will pretty much sit there in the background and do nothing until you tell it to.
That sounds wonderful. Thanks so much for the great addition to my Gallery.
Tim Musa http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
SuicideDog
Joined: 2006-01-10
Posts: 35
Posted: Tue, 2006-11-28 17:23
This is great! Thanks for adding those great features!.
Hmm.. Thats funny. I didn't get get an upgrade notice from gloss like I have in the past. Does the auto-update still work?
Stephen
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2006-11-29 00:20
SuicideDog wrote:
This is great! Thanks for adding those great features!.
You're welcome. ;-)
SuicideDog wrote:
Hmm.. Thats funny. I didn't get get an upgrade notice from gloss like I have in the past. Does the auto-update still work?
It should do; it did for me on my other PC. However, if you're not connected to the Interweb when GLoSS starts up, then you won't obviously get notified. Also, GLoSS only checks once a day for updates - errr, I think, without checking the code ;-)
Version 1.3.0 of GLoSS is now on my website in case you haven't noticed.
I've added the ability to browse albums from your Gallery directly from the Desktop Changer, and set specific images from your Gallery directly as your desktop image.
This functionality mostly fell easily out of some preparatory work I've been doing prior to the upcoming release of Gallery 2.2.
When Gallery 2.2 is released, the Remote Protocol module will directly support returning random images from specific albums, so at that point, GLoSS will no longer be dependent on the Image Block module.
I've also improved the interaction with Google Earth for anybody who uses it, so that the FlyToView ability with geo-coded images in Google Earth is much slicker.
As always, any feedback (or even a donation! ) gratefully received...
however i'm a critique person however it is ment that you change it to a positive result.
-Installer:
it didnt worked when i didnt checked to create desktop/quicklaunch icon etc ( i kept the 2 default setting) , normaly this sort of options is done the other way around .. so check all default... and after let user decide.
-Screensaver:
it is to slow and have only 1 fade effect ( i dont now what it takes for a programmer to let it do more , i assume there must excist a excisting code for it what might can be used to give it some glance , opensource based).
Desktop changer:
to be hornest.. not much to say abouth , i just run it now for around 8 hours , it switch.. however , and this is my request .. the 15 minutes change is to long. (personal i require to have it per second).
Now that is a personal request , however it would be then better if integrate to the packet ( ofcourse if my critique is apreciated) that you make it next to the text enter field a dropdown for seconds/minutes/hours perhaps even day/week/month/ .
if i could set it to seconds i would be more then happy.
it might be so that particuly the time frame is an issue in this piece of art.
especialy to make differences between cache'd items.
personaly i think that the change desktop should alway's use what is inside cache ... and make a frequency for the cache seperated.
i'm not sureif you done this... i just look true the eyes of php coding.
Not that i'm a master of php.. however it seem i have a clear "vision" of how stuff should work.
pls do not see my post as a scam , couse it is opposite.. i really love your work.
infact i dreamed of this sort of soft to have it for my needs.
if you are interested why i need this so bad then you can ask me abouth it ask:
(dev of osc2nuke.com preferd true msn)
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Sun, 2006-12-17 07:46
Thanks for the encouragement. I'm quite happy to look into some of your suggestions, so here are my thoughts, and some questions, just to make sure I understand you correctly...
wHiTeHaT44 wrote:
-Installer:
it didnt worked when i didnt checked to create desktop/quicklaunch icon etc ( i kept the 2 default setting) , normaly this sort of options is done the other way around .. so check all default... and after let user decide.
When you say it didn't work, can you clarify what exactly "didn't work"? I'll do some testing of my own, but if you can be more specific, that would be great.
wHiTeHaT44 wrote:
-Screensaver:
it is to slow and have only 1 fade effect ( i dont now what it takes for a programmer to let it do more , i assume there must excist a excisting code for it what might can be used to give it some glance , opensource based).
When you say too slow, do you mean the time it takes to fade a picture in and out is too slow? If so, could you tell me what specification of PC you're running GLoSS on, to give me some idea of how much I should possibly speed it up by? I use it on a 2.4GHz and a 3GHz dual core and obviously it works quite nicely on those sort of machines. I had previously thought of putting a "slider" type setting on the Configuration dialog, so that you could choose the fade speed yourself. Does that sound like a good idea?
I have previously done some looking into different fade/change type events, and would like to do some more work in this area. I haven't found any existing code to help, so it may take a while for me to work out the best way to do it. GLoSS is written in Borland Delphi, and I'm already using a number of open source libraries for different parts of GLoSS, but none that make it easy so far to do different effects.
wHiTeHaT44 wrote:
Desktop changer:
to be hornest.. not much to say abouth , i just run it now for around 8 hours , it switch.. however , and this is my request .. the 15 minutes change is to long. (personal i require to have it per second).
Now that is a personal request , however it would be then better if integrate to the packet ( ofcourse if my critique is apreciated) that you make it next to the text enter field a dropdown for seconds/minutes/hours perhaps even day/week/month/ .
if i could set it to seconds i would be more then happy.
it might be so that particuly the time frame is an issue in this piece of art.
I think I understand you. I can easily make the time interval settings much more flexible and will try to do so in the next release.
wHiTeHaT44 wrote:
especialy to make differences between cache'd items.
personaly i think that the change desktop should alway's use what is inside cache ... and make a frequency for the cache seperated.
If you run GLoSS in "Offline mode", then already it will only use what's inside the cache. However, GLoSS does not currently record which albums from your Gallery that particular images come from (it can't currently with the current version of the Remote Protocol), so if GLoSS only pulls images from the cache, then it would only display completely random images, whereas I think it is better for users to be able to tell the Desktop Changer to only display images from specific albums.
wHiTeHaT44 wrote:
i'm not sureif you done this... i just look true the eyes of php coding.
Not that i'm a master of php.. however it seem i have a clear "vision" of how stuff should work.
pls do not see my post as a scam , couse it is opposite.. i really love your work.
infact i dreamed of this sort of soft to have it for my needs.
Thanks for the compliments! There's no PHP in GLoSS (mostly because I'm not even a beginner PHP coder, let alone a master!) However, Windows desktop development using Delphi I'm not too bad at...
Hopefully my comments and intentions above will be useful for you when I find time to do the work.
In case you guys haven't auto-updated, I've uploaded a new version of GLoSS, which among other things gives you more control over the speed at which screensaver images fade into each other. I'd be interested to hear if that works better on lower-spec PCs, because the only PCs I have to test on are reasonably grunty.
Cheers, and have a good Christmas break and New Year.
Anybody tested GLoSS with the new release candidate of G2.2?
I haven't taken the plunge yet myself, but I'm interested in early feedback if anybody else has. The big change which might break it is some changes to how Gallery handles session information. I believe I made the appropriate changes to GLoSS a few versions back, but it would be great to have it confirmed that it still works okay.
If it's not working, some log info via DebugView would be great!
Hello...
I was trying to run GLoSS with my Gallery 2.2 installation, but am running up against a problem when running the windows application... I get an error:
"unable to log on to your Gallery. The error message returned was: Unknown response or other failure"
so I ran DebugView and got ('*'s added):
[4364] GLoSS.exe: Invoking Gallery command: http://www.******.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_controller=remote:GalleryRemote&g2_form[protocol_version]=2.11&g2_form[cmd]=login&g2_form[uname]=*******&g2_form[password]=*******
[4364] GLoSS.exe: HTTP Error 403: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
[4364] <HTML><HEAD>
[4364] <TITLE>403 Forbidden</TITLE>
[4364] </HEAD><BODY>
[4364] <H1>Forbidden</H1>
[4364] You don't have permission to access /gallery2/main.php
[4364] on this server.<P>
[4364] </BODY></HTML>
[4364]
[4364] GLoSS.exe: Login failure: Unknown response or other failure.
but when entering the 'command':
http://www.******.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_controller=remote:GalleryRemote&g2_form[protocol_version]=2.11&g2_form[cmd]=login&g2_form[uname]=*******&g2_form[password]=******* into a browser, it looks like success:
so it seems to work from a browser, but not from the windows app. Its gotta be a permissions issue or something similar.. I have been through a bunch of variants of .htaccess, all the .php files have a permission of 755, but I am just coming up with the error...
would you have any suggestions as to what I could look at?
thanks for any help...!
David
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Mon, 2007-04-02 23:20
Mmmm, weird.
I'm assuming you're running the latest version of GLoSS? (1.4.5).
I've recently upgraded a test gallery of mine to the full G2.2 and it seems okay.
Would you be happy to set up a test account in your Gallery for me, and PM me the login details, and I could do some testing against your Gallery installation? I wouldn't change anything, simply test that I can log on; it can be a read-only account if you like.
Hey Conor..
I have noticed that GLoSS will seem to access the hard drive about once every 2 minutes for some time depending on how many pictures are in the cache directory. For me it can be up to 45 seconds of file accesses, and it looks like there are just over 1000 files in the cache directory that it goes through. Also it peaks up the cpu cycles as well during this time, which can affect other processes. Also I am only using the screen saver, not the background change.
I am using File Monitor from Sysinternals to see the accesses (I was looking for something else when GLoSS started showing up).
Are the frequent periodic accesses intentional? and is there a way that I can slow that scan rate down?
thanks for any suggestions...!
david
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Tue, 2007-06-05 03:10
Yeah, they were intentional. It's something I had a bit of fun developing for myself, but it's probably not really that useful. What it's doing is looking for geo-tagged images, and then compiling those into a KML file in your cache folder which allows Google Earth to display those geo-tagged images.
There's almost no performance hit on my development PC, but I appreciate that might not be the case on other people's PCs, and is a bit of a waste of PC time if one doesn't use it.
Given that you've prompted me to give it a bit of thought, I'm thinking I might just take all the Google Earth/Google Maps functionality out of the Desktop Changer; I don't think anybody will miss it. Or maybe at the least make it optional, so that if you're not interested, then at least it's not wasting your PC's time.
Conor,
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense now. Having the Google Earth as an option may be ideal. I have been wanting to try that feature out, but haven't gotten geo data into a picture, (I know I could use anything to try it out).
It hasent really caused noticeable trouble, I was just trying to track down something else that was creating the performance hit, and GLoSS kept popping up. So I dont really know if it was contributing to anything or not.
but thanks for taking a look at it!!
david
josini
Joined: 2005-12-07
Posts: 14
Posted: Wed, 2007-08-01 14:32
I'm having trouble with the screensaver! After selecting gloss as screensaver I can see the images in the small preview but when I hit the preview-button to watch it live the screen goes black and nothing happens.
Here is what I get in DebugView:
"[3112] gloss.scr: Window to preview in not visible"
Could it be because I use 2 screens?
If I start the screensaver by clicking it in the windows-dir I can see in DebugView that it loads images from the cache but the screen is still black. That is - one of the screens is black - nothing happens with the second.
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2007-08-01 20:46
Hey there,
Sorry to hear you're having trouble.
I think the particular DebugView line you've quoted is a red herring; it's just referring to the fact that the little preview window in the Desktop Properties dialog is no longer visible, presumably since the main preview thinks it's on top.
I use it on a 2 monitor setup with absolutely no problems; from the start I wrote it to support multiple monitors.
What OS are you running it on? Does the Desktop Changer part of it successfully change your desktop background?
Can you PM me a copy of the log from DebugView, and I'll have a look and see if I can spot anything? You can save the DebugView results as a text file from the File menu.
I don't know what happended yesterday - but now it works! A bit slow though but it works.
josini
Joined: 2005-12-07
Posts: 14
Posted: Thu, 2007-08-02 10:17
A feature that I would love: Display the album name with the image just like Exif-info but maybe in a special info-box.
I know that GLoSS not always has the albumname present (ie when only displaying selected albums) but when it displays ie the last 10 albums the album name is visible in DebugView and it should be possible to display that info with the image.
When displaying selected albums you should also reasonable easy find the albumname for which you request a random image. GLoSS has already found the album-id for which it should get an image and GLoSS already has the albumname<->albumid relation available.
apippin
Joined: 2007-06-11
Posts: 190
Posted: Tue, 2007-08-28 05:09
I just started to use GLoSS, and I love it. Thanks for all your work on this great application. Has the interface improved to the image block feature of Gallery2 to allow GLoSS to pull the Gallery Title of a given image and display that in the EXIF Info Overlay? If this still isn't possible, is there another EXIF field one could store the Title in and have GLoSS make it available as a selection in the EXIF Info Overlay selection boxes (like the User Comment field for example)? I've never taken the time to write descriptions for the photos in my Gallery, but all of them have good Titles in Gallery that I've written over the years. I'd like to pull these Titles out to the EXIF Info Overlay if at all possible. Let me know your thoughts on the feasibility of doing such an enhancement. Thanks!
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2007-08-29 02:50
Hi,
apippin wrote:
Has the interface improved to the image block feature of Gallery2 to allow GLoSS to pull the Gallery Title of a given image and display that in the EXIF Info Overlay?
Thanks for the feedback. ;-)
As far as I know, the Image Block is still only returning the Description. E.g. here's the HTML returned for an image from my v2.1 Gallery.
<div class="one-image">
<h3> Random Image </h3>
<table class="ImageFrame_shadow" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr>
<td class="LLT"></td>
<td rowspan="2" colspan="2" class="IMG">
<a href="http://gallery.ildica.com/v/Huntsbury/Eclipse/IMG_1451.jpg.html" >
<img src="http://gallery.ildica.com/d/8373-1/IMG_1451.jpg" width="1280"
height="853" id="IFid1" class="ImageFrame_image"
alt="Headlights out at Godley Head while waiting with Trevor for things to clear" longdesc=""/></a></td>
<td class="RRT"></td>
</tr>
<tr> <td class="LL" style="height:843px" >
<div class="V"> </div></td> <td class="RR" style="height:843px" >
<div class="V"> </div></td> </tr>
<tr> <td class="BL"></td> <td class="BBL"></td>
<td class="BB" style="width:1271px" ><div class="H"></div></td>
<td class="BR"></td> </tr> </table>
<h4 class="giDescription"> Headlights out at Godley Head while waiting with Trevor for things to clear </h4> </div>
GLoSS should be looking for the contents of the giDescription tag, and as such, GLoSS has no control over what your Gallery returns.
I probably could enhance GLoSS to allow the selection of the User Comment field in the EXIF info for the image, yes.
I'll add it to the list, and see if I can find some time to make the change.
Thanks for the effort! May I know if this supports Gallery 2.0.4? Thanks!
-----------------------------------------------
My Album:Photo Album
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2007-08-29 02:43
Hi,
chivas12 wrote:
Thanks for the effort! May I know if this supports Gallery 2.0.4?
This is a bit embarassing, since my website says GLoSS requires 2.1.1 or later, but I can't actually remember why. ;-)
It could be that I wrote that because I haven't actually tested it against earlier versions.
I think it might be easiest if you just try it and see. If it doesn't work, the uninstaller should tidy everything up nicely for you on your PC anyway.
Thanks for the additional information about what the image block is returning. It does appear to be missing other Gallery information, like the Title. There's nothing you can do about that! Fortunately, I've setup my Gallery to update the EXIF "User Comment" field with the Title that is entered in Gallery. So, having the ability to extract this EXIF field and have GLoSS allow it to be selected and shown, should do the trick!
However, I have noticed something strange about this EXIF field in the images stored in the GLoSS Local Cache. All the EXIF fields match the EXIF field data stored in the images under the Gallery albums directory on the server. However, it appears that the images in the Local Cache set the "User Comment" EXIF field to the date and time the picture was displayed by GLoSS on the local machine. The value that I have placed in that field on the server, is not being preserved on the local machine (but just for that 1 EXIF field, the others are fine). I'm not sure if this is something GLoSS is doing, or if it is coming from somewhere else (like Gallery). I just wanted to point that oddity out to you, in case you have any insight there, or run into the same affect when you turn on the new feature.
Thanks for adding this to your feature request list.
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Wed, 2007-08-29 04:35
Yeah, that's GLoSS doing that, sorry. I wanted a way to "store" the description when I download it from a Gallery, and GLoSS doesn't store any other information about an image other than the image file itself, so using the User Comment field was an attempt to store that info for when the image gets retrieved from the cache.
I'm not 100% sure it's working as I intended currently, and you want to use that field for your own purposes anyway, so I'll have a think about the best way forward.
That certainly makes more sense now. There might be a slight variation that will work both ways in this regard. If Gallery has a description, store that in the "User Comment" field as you do today. However, if Gallery does not have a description (the description is blank), leave the "User Comment" field as is. Don't store anything in it, preserving what is already there. If you did this, then the current "EXIF Description" in the overlay selection would work both ways. If you are pulling the description from the "User Comment" field anyway when the picture is displayed, it will either be the Gallery Description, or the contents of the original field if there was no Gallery Description available at the time the picture was downloaded. Another option might be to use the EXIF "Description" field to store the Gallery Description in instead of the "User Comment" field, and then add the "User Comment" field as a new EXIF Overlay option. The only downside with this approach is that the "User Comment" field can be any length, while the "Description" field has a 1999 character limit. The EXIF field to add doesn't have to be the "User Comment" field. As long as there is a "text" like field (even if it has a 1999 character limit) that you can make available in the Overlay, that gives us the option of loading that EXIF field with the Gallery Title for example. Here are some other fields that could work in the overlay besides the "User Comment" field:
description
artist
history
Anyway, just a few more thoughts on the matter for you to chew on.
Thanks!
opel70
Joined: 2002-11-07
Posts: 79
Posted: Tue, 2007-10-02 17:39
Hello again,
I have just installed GLoSS onto my laptop at work. One addition that I was thinking might be nice is to limit the cache based on size as well. So if the cache directory gets over XXX MB GLoSS would delete older pictures.
Alternatively, if I resize the images in the cache folder, but don't rename them, will GLoSS not redownload that image? So I have an image in the cache that is much larger than my screen size. When I resize the image it uses much less space. The next time GLoSS randomly pulls that image from the gallery, will it use my resized image, or will it detect that the image has changed and download it from the gallery again?
Tim Musa http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Tue, 2007-10-02 19:16
Hi there,
opel70 wrote:
The next time GLoSS randomly pulls that image from the gallery, will it use my resized image, or will it detect that the image has changed and download it from the gallery again?
GLoSS checks files in the cache purely on the filename (which is derived from your Gallery URL and the internal Gallery ID of the image), so you should be fine to resize your cache images; as long as the filename stays the same, GLoSS will use the cached image rather than downloading from your Gallery.
It seems as tried to add another desktop using the .reg file it worked fine except when I removed the password it went back to the default gallery random block, i would like the images to come from a particular album but really want to hand out the password _ I dont that someone needs your password, just to be able to pull from a gallery... in much the same way it is open to to the public anayway.. is there a way to configure this? also did find a problem that if the desktop was set to 'lock desktop items' it did not work, ie once it had worked once it would not change the background, although I could see them in the windows desktop set up ,? ... I am not sure if this a windows default setting..
Thanks regards
Russell
rusty1001
Joined: 2007-01-24
Posts: 54
Posted: Sun, 2007-12-16 10:19
Hi
I have the new version , and the reg file(extracted from my reg files) and exe in the same folder
Any one know how to run this install with the reg file,??
Not sure how to configure this, tried a few things but nothing yet
thanks for a great addition,
Russell
Version 1.4.9 released
The latest release of GLoSS includes the following new functionality/bug fixes:
Provide ability to specify file containing GLoSS Windows registry entries to be merged instead of specifying Gallery settings in the installer (use /REG=regfile.reg on the command line where regfile.reg is a registry file in the same folder as the installer).
conorboyd
Joined: 2005-03-29
Posts: 166
Posted: Fri, 2007-12-21 01:12
Hi Russell,
Sorry, busy on other things at the minute.
I've just tested things again on a clean PC.
Say I have the 1.4.9 installer and a suitable .reg file in a folder, e.g. C:\Conor
Then I enter the following command line: GLoSS-1.4.9-Setup.exe /REG=myregfile.reg
What happens is that the installer starts up, and while it will still ask the user for the correct Program Files folder and cache folder to use, it shouldn't ask the user for their Gallery details (URL, username, etc).
At the end of the installation, the installer will ask whether or not they wish to import the contents of the .reg file into their registry. If they say Yes, then the installer will finish, and GLoSS should then be correctly configured to point to whatever Gallery you configured in your .reg file.
So it's not a completely "unattended" installation, but it removes the need for users to be aware of your URL, username etc.
I'm open to feedback on whether or not that meets your needs, but with my testing, I think it's currently doing what I intended it to. ;-)
run this in command line - windows key + r or
find the command prompt in the left menu,
and add this line (<b>gloss</b> is the choice of folder)
C://<b>gloss</b>/GLoSS-1.4.9-Setup.exe /REG=myregfile.reg
Posts: 17
I can't explain it, but things just started working. The installer now works; Microsoft weirdness. On a seperate subject, I've noticed that sometimes GLoSS seems to get confused about re-sizing the pictures for display. I have it configured to re-size large images to fit an to leave the smaller images alone. Sometimes the small images are stretched to fit the screen and sometimes they are not. Sometimes the large images have been blown up so only a portion of them is visible. This seems to be an intermittent problem and only happens occasionally. Anyone else experienced similar symptoms?
Kevin
Posts: 166
Could it be that you've got your Windows Desktop settings set so that desktop images are "stretched"?
I know that's caught the odd other person out.
Other than that, no, I've never noticed similar behaviour myself.
Dunno if you'd noticed, but I just released version 1.1, which fixes the odd bug, and adds the ability to upload JPEGs to Gallery.
Cheers,
C.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 17
Hi Conor,
It's both the desktop and screensaver that behave in this way occasionally, and it doesn't seem to be related to the Window's XP configuration items.
I did notice, however, that if the Window's XP configuration for the screensaver is set to "On resume, password protect", then GLoSS's feature to not start the screensaver when a particular program is "active" does not work. When this option is not selected, everything works as advertised.
I am running GLoSS on a Media Center PC that is in my living room, and I'd like the screensaver not to start when I'm using it to watch TV. This works fine as long as the screensaver is not configured to display the welcome screen on resumption. In addition, I control my kids access to the TV by requiring a password to be entered. So ideally, once we've finished watching TV and closed the Media Center application, I'd like the GLoSS screensaver to kick in after a few minutes and require a login to access the computer after that.
Kevin
Posts: 166
Strange. I wonder if it could be the values that Windows gives me for the screen size and desktop size (e.g. screen size is the resolution your monitor is set to, and desktop size includes the desktop that stretches across dual monitors etc). I wonder if Windows is giving me different values at different times on a Media PC? I have no idea.
So if I understand correctly, you'd like a feature added to GLoSS so that GLoSS asks you for a password, and then you can turn off the Windows built-in "On resume, password protect" option?
I'll look into it and let you know.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 17
Well if it just worked properly when the Windows built-in "On resume, password protect" option was selected that would be best.
Posts: 166
Without looking into it any more closely, I suspect that would require some major work on my part. Whereas, it's only taken me 5 minutes already to add a "Lock Workstation" option to the GLoSS configuration dialog for the screensaver, and explicitly lock the workstation after the screensaver ends if that option is selected - this means it's still the same username and password as you use to log on to the PC, you don't need separate details for GLoSS.
I trust that will be an acceptable workaround for you.
Just need to do a bit more testing on it, and I'll upload a new version for you.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 35
Hey there I've been keeping up with all the changes. I love them all. I have one request. All the stuff that comes with the desktop changer like the taskbar item for quick config, the auto update, the screensaver shortcut is fantastic but to be honest I can't use the desktop changer part. When it's running I don't see any of the desktops it changes because I utilize the active desktop heavily with content and stuff (I don't care what anyone says, if used right it friggen rocks). Since I use a web based active desktop I don't even see the REAL background that is changing. So now with the request. Can you setup an option to disable the desktop changer part but still use all of the other goodies that come with the desktop changer?
Stephen
Posts: 166
Hey there,
Long time no see... ;-)
How does the following sound?
I could add another item to the "Refresh Every..." combobox of "Disable" or similar, and if selected, then the desktop image never gets changed (and any related functionality gets disabled).
I'm a bit confused though - surely it's pretty much just the auto-update feature in the Desktop Changer that you really use then?
Thoughts?
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 35
I use the upload feature, the screen saver shortcut, the auto-update feature and I sometimes use the screen saver configuration when I want to change it up. The Disable option would be primo! Thanks again for all the hard work!
Stephen
Posts: 166
Ahhh, it's so new, I'd forgotten about that bit... ;-)
You're welcome!
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 35
I wrote like a three page comment and then the friggin thing got lost cuz I closed the wrong browser. So I'm now going to just summarize it again and give you the quick and dirty.
Request for advanced caching
Online mode:
-Get which picture to display from site
-Check primary cache location if not present goto next cache location
-Check secondary cache location (I would love to be able to specify like 4-5 ) if picture is there transfer to primary location
-If not cached grab from website and put in primary cache. (the idea is that if one computer grabs it then the rest should be able to get by checking it's peers first even if that cache is on a laptop with a share)
-Display picture
Offline mode:
I'm not sure exactly how the offline mode works but I would like it to have the same functionality
This is primarily to address my laptops that I want to have a local cache instead of a shared cache but yet still have the ability to grab the picture from a shared cache rather than the web.
If you are wondering.. yes I do run this on that many computers that it would make a difference. I have seven computers at home (2 picture frames) and 4 at work that run this. Of those 11 computers 4 are laptops. Between me the wife and kids we use all of them. I also have about 6000 pictures on my website, and that number keeps going up. I can live without the caching stuff but it would be nice.
Stephen
Posts: 166
I'll have a think, but I wouldn't think that's too hard to do. Should be relatively straightforward for online mode.
Offline mode is not as simple. When offline, GLoSS just pulls random images from all the images in the cache, so it's not as if I can pick a random image name out of thin air and then see if it's in the primary cache. GLoSS doesn't keep a list anywhere of all the image names in your Gallery. I'm not quite sure how to handle things here...
But at least if I added the requested functionality to online mode, then your caches would be a bit fresher anyway?
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 35
I figured thats how the offline mode worked. Random pics from local cache only would work. If you wanted to get fancy you could randomize what cache then randomize a pic from that cache.. but I don't think that would work all that great. I'd just do local cache only when offline.. kinda makes sense also that if in offline mode you prolly don't have network access.
Stephen
Posts: 35
It's been a couple weeks so I decided to hit you up and ask if you had made any progress on the whole caching thing.
Stephen
Posts: 166
Noooo, sorry, I haven't.
I've been taking a bit of a short break from GLoSS (and it's another holiday weekend down here in NZ this weekend), but I'll try and get back into it soon after that.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
I've added Secondary Caching to GLoSS in version 1.2.1, available on my website now.
Hope it goes some way towards doing what you want.
Let me know what you think/how you get on...
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 79
I'm in a bit of the same situation where it would be really nice to have the option to disable the desktop changing, but still have all of the other features available. Just wondering if this request got lost up there.
Tim Musa
http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
Posts: 166
Nope, it's still on the list, I've just been a bit busy with my "real" job lately, but I'm starting to get back into GLoSS a bit more now.
I'll look into doing this for you guys next, but I've also got my eye on the changes coming up in G2.2 around the Remote Protocol. I'm hoping this means I can move away from relying on the Image Block to serve random images, and instead use the Remote Protocol directly to give me random images. This would also mean I would then be able to tie images displayed in the screensaver directly back to the image in your Gallery. One of the early requests for GLoSS was the ability to be able to "click" on an image that had been shown by GLoSS and go to that image's page in your Gallery. I should be able to do all this and more if my reading of the upcoming Remote Protocol changes in G2.2 is correct.
But it'll take me a bit of time... ;-)
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
Okay, I've got this done. All I've done is add an extra value of "Disable" to the "Refresh Every" combobox, and if the current setting is disabled, then GLoSS will not automatically update your desktop every X minutes. I've left it so that a GLoSS user can still manually choose to update their desktop, as I really can't see the benefit of disabling everything else, but at least it means if you don't want it to change your desktop, then the desktop changer will pretty much sit there in the background and do nothing until you tell it to.
I trust that is acceptable?
Cheers,
C.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 79
That sounds wonderful. Thanks so much for the great addition to my Gallery.
Tim Musa
http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
Posts: 35
This is great! Thanks for adding those great features!.
Hmm.. Thats funny. I didn't get get an upgrade notice from gloss like I have in the past. Does the auto-update still work?
Stephen
Posts: 166
You're welcome. ;-)
It should do; it did for me on my other PC. However, if you're not connected to the Interweb when GLoSS starts up, then you won't obviously get notified. Also, GLoSS only checks once a day for updates - errr, I think, without checking the code ;-)
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
Hi again,
Version 1.3.0 of GLoSS is now on my website in case you haven't noticed.
I've added the ability to browse albums from your Gallery directly from the Desktop Changer, and set specific images from your Gallery directly as your desktop image.
This functionality mostly fell easily out of some preparatory work I've been doing prior to the upcoming release of Gallery 2.2.
When Gallery 2.2 is released, the Remote Protocol module will directly support returning random images from specific albums, so at that point, GLoSS will no longer be dependent on the Image Block module.
I've also improved the interaction with Google Earth for anybody who uses it, so that the FlyToView ability with geo-coded images in Google Earth is much slicker.
As always, any feedback (or even a donation!
) gratefully received...
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 5
First of all:
WHAT YOU MADE IS AWSOME .. just EXCELENT!!
however i'm a critique person however it is ment that you change it to a positive result.
-Installer:
it didnt worked when i didnt checked to create desktop/quicklaunch icon etc ( i kept the 2 default setting) , normaly this sort of options is done the other way around .. so check all default... and after let user decide.
-Screensaver:
it is to slow and have only 1 fade effect ( i dont now what it takes for a programmer to let it do more , i assume there must excist a excisting code for it what might can be used to give it some glance , opensource based).
Desktop changer:
to be hornest.. not much to say abouth , i just run it now for around 8 hours , it switch.. however , and this is my request .. the 15 minutes change is to long. (personal i require to have it per second).
Now that is a personal request , however it would be then better if integrate to the packet ( ofcourse if my critique is apreciated) that you make it next to the text enter field a dropdown for seconds/minutes/hours perhaps even day/week/month/ .
if i could set it to seconds i would be more then happy.
it might be so that particuly the time frame is an issue in this piece of art.
especialy to make differences between cache'd items.
personaly i think that the change desktop should alway's use what is inside cache ... and make a frequency for the cache seperated.
i'm not sureif you done this... i just look true the eyes of php coding.
Not that i'm a master of php.. however it seem i have a clear "vision" of how stuff should work.
pls do not see my post as a scam , couse it is opposite.. i really love your work.
infact i dreamed of this sort of soft to have it for my needs.
if you are interested why i need this so bad then you can ask me abouth it ask:
(dev of osc2nuke.com preferd true msn)
Posts: 166
Thanks for the encouragement. I'm quite happy to look into some of your suggestions, so here are my thoughts, and some questions, just to make sure I understand you correctly...
When you say it didn't work, can you clarify what exactly "didn't work"? I'll do some testing of my own, but if you can be more specific, that would be great.
When you say too slow, do you mean the time it takes to fade a picture in and out is too slow? If so, could you tell me what specification of PC you're running GLoSS on, to give me some idea of how much I should possibly speed it up by? I use it on a 2.4GHz and a 3GHz dual core and obviously it works quite nicely on those sort of machines. I had previously thought of putting a "slider" type setting on the Configuration dialog, so that you could choose the fade speed yourself. Does that sound like a good idea?
I have previously done some looking into different fade/change type events, and would like to do some more work in this area. I haven't found any existing code to help, so it may take a while for me to work out the best way to do it. GLoSS is written in Borland Delphi, and I'm already using a number of open source libraries for different parts of GLoSS, but none that make it easy so far to do different effects.
I think I understand you. I can easily make the time interval settings much more flexible and will try to do so in the next release.
If you run GLoSS in "Offline mode", then already it will only use what's inside the cache. However, GLoSS does not currently record which albums from your Gallery that particular images come from (it can't currently with the current version of the Remote Protocol), so if GLoSS only pulls images from the cache, then it would only display completely random images, whereas I think it is better for users to be able to tell the Desktop Changer to only display images from specific albums.
Thanks for the compliments! There's no PHP in GLoSS (mostly because I'm not even a beginner PHP coder, let alone a master!)
However, Windows desktop development using Delphi I'm not too bad at...
Hopefully my comments and intentions above will be useful for you when I find time to do the work.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
Hello,
In case you guys haven't auto-updated, I've uploaded a new version of GLoSS, which among other things gives you more control over the speed at which screensaver images fade into each other. I'd be interested to hear if that works better on lower-spec PCs, because the only PCs I have to test on are reasonably grunty.
Cheers, and have a good Christmas break and New Year.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
Anybody tested GLoSS with the new release candidate of G2.2?
I haven't taken the plunge yet myself, but I'm interested in early feedback if anybody else has. The big change which might break it is some changes to how Gallery handles session information. I believe I made the appropriate changes to GLoSS a few versions back, but it would be great to have it confirmed that it still works okay.
If it's not working, some log info via DebugView would be great!
Happy New Year to all...
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 6
Hello...
I was trying to run GLoSS with my Gallery 2.2 installation, but am running up against a problem when running the windows application... I get an error:
"unable to log on to your Gallery. The error message returned was: Unknown response or other failure"
so I ran DebugView and got ('*'s added):
[4364] GLoSS.exe: Invoking Gallery command: http://www.******.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_controller=remote:GalleryRemote&g2_form[protocol_version]=2.11&g2_form[cmd]=login&g2_form[uname]=*******&g2_form[password]=*******
[4364] GLoSS.exe: HTTP Error 403: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
[4364] <HTML><HEAD>
[4364] <TITLE>403 Forbidden</TITLE>
[4364] </HEAD><BODY>
[4364] <H1>Forbidden</H1>
[4364] You don't have permission to access /gallery2/main.php
[4364] on this server.<P>
[4364] </BODY></HTML>
[4364]
[4364] GLoSS.exe: Login failure: Unknown response or other failure.
but when entering the 'command':
http://www.******.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_controller=remote:GalleryRemote&g2_form[protocol_version]=2.11&g2_form[cmd]=login&g2_form[uname]=*******&g2_form[password]=******* into a browser, it looks like success:
#__GR2PROTO__
server_version=2.11
debug_core_version=7,18
debug_module_version=1.0.9
status=0
status_text=Login successful.
debug_user=gloss
debug_time=0.396s
auth_token=6f990a04fe82
so it seems to work from a browser, but not from the windows app. Its gotta be a permissions issue or something similar.. I have been through a bunch of variants of .htaccess, all the .php files have a permission of 755, but I am just coming up with the error...
would you have any suggestions as to what I could look at?
thanks for any help...!
David
Posts: 166
Mmmm, weird.
I'm assuming you're running the latest version of GLoSS? (1.4.5).
I've recently upgraded a test gallery of mine to the full G2.2 and it seems okay.
Would you be happy to set up a test account in your Gallery for me, and PM me the login details, and I could do some testing against your Gallery installation? I wouldn't change anything, simply test that I can log on; it can be a read-only account if you like.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 166
Seemed to be an intermittent authentication problem with G2.2.
I've implemented a workaround for this issue in GLoSS version 1.4.6.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 6
Hey Conor..
I have noticed that GLoSS will seem to access the hard drive about once every 2 minutes for some time depending on how many pictures are in the cache directory. For me it can be up to 45 seconds of file accesses, and it looks like there are just over 1000 files in the cache directory that it goes through. Also it peaks up the cpu cycles as well during this time, which can affect other processes. Also I am only using the screen saver, not the background change.
I am using File Monitor from Sysinternals to see the accesses (I was looking for something else when GLoSS started showing up).
Are the frequent periodic accesses intentional? and is there a way that I can slow that scan rate down?
thanks for any suggestions...!
david
Posts: 166
Yeah, they were intentional. It's something I had a bit of fun developing for myself, but it's probably not really that useful. What it's doing is looking for geo-tagged images, and then compiling those into a KML file in your cache folder which allows Google Earth to display those geo-tagged images.
There's almost no performance hit on my development PC, but I appreciate that might not be the case on other people's PCs, and is a bit of a waste of PC time if one doesn't use it.
Given that you've prompted me to give it a bit of thought, I'm thinking I might just take all the Google Earth/Google Maps functionality out of the Desktop Changer; I don't think anybody will miss it. Or maybe at the least make it optional, so that if you're not interested, then at least it's not wasting your PC's time.
My apologies if it's been causing you trouble.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 6
Conor,
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense now. Having the Google Earth as an option may be ideal. I have been wanting to try that feature out, but haven't gotten geo data into a picture, (I know I could use anything to try it out).
It hasent really caused noticeable trouble, I was just trying to track down something else that was creating the performance hit, and GLoSS kept popping up. So I dont really know if it was contributing to anything or not.
but thanks for taking a look at it!!
david
Posts: 14
I'm having trouble with the screensaver! After selecting gloss as screensaver I can see the images in the small preview but when I hit the preview-button to watch it live the screen goes black and nothing happens.
Here is what I get in DebugView:
"[3112] gloss.scr: Window to preview in not visible"
Could it be because I use 2 screens?
If I start the screensaver by clicking it in the windows-dir I can see in DebugView that it loads images from the cache but the screen is still black. That is - one of the screens is black - nothing happens with the second.
Posts: 166
Hey there,
Sorry to hear you're having trouble.
I think the particular DebugView line you've quoted is a red herring; it's just referring to the fact that the little preview window in the Desktop Properties dialog is no longer visible, presumably since the main preview thinks it's on top.
I use it on a 2 monitor setup with absolutely no problems; from the start I wrote it to support multiple monitors.
What OS are you running it on? Does the Desktop Changer part of it successfully change your desktop background?
Can you PM me a copy of the log from DebugView, and I'll have a look and see if I can spot anything? You can save the DebugView results as a text file from the File menu.
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 14
I don't know what happended yesterday - but now it works! A bit slow though but it works.
Posts: 14
A feature that I would love: Display the album name with the image just like Exif-info but maybe in a special info-box.
I know that GLoSS not always has the albumname present (ie when only displaying selected albums) but when it displays ie the last 10 albums the album name is visible in DebugView and it should be possible to display that info with the image.
When displaying selected albums you should also reasonable easy find the albumname for which you request a random image. GLoSS has already found the album-id for which it should get an image and GLoSS already has the albumname<->albumid relation available.
Posts: 190
I just started to use GLoSS, and I love it. Thanks for all your work on this great application. Has the interface improved to the image block feature of Gallery2 to allow GLoSS to pull the Gallery Title of a given image and display that in the EXIF Info Overlay? If this still isn't possible, is there another EXIF field one could store the Title in and have GLoSS make it available as a selection in the EXIF Info Overlay selection boxes (like the User Comment field for example)? I've never taken the time to write descriptions for the photos in my Gallery, but all of them have good Titles in Gallery that I've written over the years. I'd like to pull these Titles out to the EXIF Info Overlay if at all possible. Let me know your thoughts on the feasibility of doing such an enhancement. Thanks!
Posts: 166
Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. ;-)
As far as I know, the Image Block is still only returning the Description. E.g. here's the HTML returned for an image from my v2.1 Gallery.
GLoSS should be looking for the contents of the giDescription tag, and as such, GLoSS has no control over what your Gallery returns.
I probably could enhance GLoSS to allow the selection of the User Comment field in the EXIF info for the image, yes.
I'll add it to the list, and see if I can find some time to make the change.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 43
Thanks for the effort! May I know if this supports Gallery 2.0.4? Thanks!
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My Album:Photo Album
Posts: 166
Hi,
This is a bit embarassing, since my website says GLoSS requires 2.1.1 or later, but I can't actually remember why. ;-)
It could be that I wrote that because I haven't actually tested it against earlier versions.
I think it might be easiest if you just try it and see. If it doesn't work, the uninstaller should tidy everything up nicely for you on your PC anyway.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 190
Thanks for the additional information about what the image block is returning. It does appear to be missing other Gallery information, like the Title. There's nothing you can do about that! Fortunately, I've setup my Gallery to update the EXIF "User Comment" field with the Title that is entered in Gallery. So, having the ability to extract this EXIF field and have GLoSS allow it to be selected and shown, should do the trick!
However, I have noticed something strange about this EXIF field in the images stored in the GLoSS Local Cache. All the EXIF fields match the EXIF field data stored in the images under the Gallery albums directory on the server. However, it appears that the images in the Local Cache set the "User Comment" EXIF field to the date and time the picture was displayed by GLoSS on the local machine. The value that I have placed in that field on the server, is not being preserved on the local machine (but just for that 1 EXIF field, the others are fine). I'm not sure if this is something GLoSS is doing, or if it is coming from somewhere else (like Gallery). I just wanted to point that oddity out to you, in case you have any insight there, or run into the same affect when you turn on the new feature.
Thanks for adding this to your feature request list.
Posts: 166
Yeah, that's GLoSS doing that, sorry. I wanted a way to "store" the description when I download it from a Gallery, and GLoSS doesn't store any other information about an image other than the image file itself, so using the User Comment field was an attempt to store that info for when the image gets retrieved from the cache.
I'm not 100% sure it's working as I intended currently, and you want to use that field for your own purposes anyway, so I'll have a think about the best way forward.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 190
That certainly makes more sense now. There might be a slight variation that will work both ways in this regard. If Gallery has a description, store that in the "User Comment" field as you do today. However, if Gallery does not have a description (the description is blank), leave the "User Comment" field as is. Don't store anything in it, preserving what is already there. If you did this, then the current "EXIF Description" in the overlay selection would work both ways. If you are pulling the description from the "User Comment" field anyway when the picture is displayed, it will either be the Gallery Description, or the contents of the original field if there was no Gallery Description available at the time the picture was downloaded. Another option might be to use the EXIF "Description" field to store the Gallery Description in instead of the "User Comment" field, and then add the "User Comment" field as a new EXIF Overlay option. The only downside with this approach is that the "User Comment" field can be any length, while the "Description" field has a 1999 character limit. The EXIF field to add doesn't have to be the "User Comment" field. As long as there is a "text" like field (even if it has a 1999 character limit) that you can make available in the Overlay, that gives us the option of loading that EXIF field with the Gallery Title for example. Here are some other fields that could work in the overlay besides the "User Comment" field:
description
artist
history
Anyway, just a few more thoughts on the matter for you to chew on.
Thanks!
Posts: 79
Hello again,
I have just installed GLoSS onto my laptop at work. One addition that I was thinking might be nice is to limit the cache based on size as well. So if the cache directory gets over XXX MB GLoSS would delete older pictures.
Alternatively, if I resize the images in the cache folder, but don't rename them, will GLoSS not redownload that image? So I have an image in the cache that is much larger than my screen size. When I resize the image it uses much less space. The next time GLoSS randomly pulls that image from the gallery, will it use my resized image, or will it detect that the image has changed and download it from the gallery again?
Tim Musa
http://www.musaland.com/gallery2/
Gallery version: 2.1.1
Apache version: 1.3.34
PHP version: 4.4.2
Graphics Toolkit: ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM
Operating system: Windows Server 2000 SP4
Posts: 166
Hi there,
GLoSS checks files in the cache purely on the filename (which is derived from your Gallery URL and the internal Gallery ID of the image), so you should be fine to resize your cache images; as long as the filename stays the same, GLoSS will use the cached image rather than downloading from your Gallery.
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 54
Hi
Thanks for the great addition,good idea
It seems as tried to add another desktop using the .reg file it worked fine except when I removed the password it went back to the default gallery random block, i would like the images to come from a particular album but really want to hand out the password _ I dont that someone needs your password, just to be able to pull from a gallery... in much the same way it is open to to the public anayway.. is there a way to configure this? also did find a problem that if the desktop was set to 'lock desktop items' it did not work, ie once it had worked once it would not change the background, although I could see them in the windows desktop set up ,? ... I am not sure if this a windows default setting..
Thanks regards
Russell
Posts: 54
Hi
I have the new version , and the reg file(extracted from my reg files) and exe in the same folder
Any one know how to run this install with the reg file,??
Not sure how to configure this, tried a few things but nothing yet
thanks for a great addition,
Russell
Version 1.4.9 released
The latest release of GLoSS includes the following new functionality/bug fixes:
Provide ability to specify file containing GLoSS Windows registry entries to be merged instead of specifying Gallery settings in the installer (use /REG=regfile.reg on the command line where regfile.reg is a registry file in the same folder as the installer).
Posts: 166
Hi Russell,
Sorry, busy on other things at the minute.
I've just tested things again on a clean PC.
Say I have the 1.4.9 installer and a suitable .reg file in a folder, e.g. C:\Conor
Then I enter the following command line:
GLoSS-1.4.9-Setup.exe /REG=myregfile.regWhat happens is that the installer starts up, and while it will still ask the user for the correct Program Files folder and cache folder to use, it shouldn't ask the user for their Gallery details (URL, username, etc).
At the end of the installation, the installer will ask whether or not they wish to import the contents of the .reg file into their registry. If they say Yes, then the installer will finish, and GLoSS should then be correctly configured to point to whatever Gallery you configured in your .reg file.
So it's not a completely "unattended" installation, but it removes the need for users to be aware of your URL, username etc.
I'm open to feedback on whether or not that meets your needs, but with my testing, I think it's currently doing what I intended it to. ;-)
Cheers,
Conor
Christchurch, NZ
GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer
Posts: 54
Thanks
that worked great!
fyi other users
run this in command line - windows key + r or
find the command prompt in the left menu,
and add this line (<b>gloss</b> is the choice of folder)
C://<b>gloss</b>/GLoSS-1.4.9-Setup.exe /REG=myregfile.reg
cheers