Picasa web albums

Yes Please! I miss my picasa screen saver!

I plan to add a screensaver to my Picasa2 channel. Unfortunately, it may be a few weeks before I get to it. My computer broke, and I'm waiting for a new one to come from China, so I'm not doing any Roku development right now. Once it arrives and I finish off a couple of other projects, I'll get to work on it.

When I open an album in Picasa2, pause the slide show and attempt to go backward (i.e. from the first picture in the album to the last picture in the album) all I get is the Picasa logo. When I hit the reverse button a few more times, I still get the Picasa logo -- no pictures. Then when I hit the forward button, I get the last few pictures from the album. Seems like a bug.

Also, it would be nice to be able to pause without seeing the slide number displayed on the screen.

Not complaining, mind you. 😄

If nobody else wants to do it, I might take a crack at it. Google Photos is a pretty impressive offering and the old PWA API still seems to be able to get at most of the underlying data model.

"wpinkman" wrote:
If nobody else wants to do it, I might take a crack at it. Google Photos is a pretty impressive offering and the old PWA API still seems to be able to get at most of the underlying data model.

I've been hearing good things about Google Photos, although I haven't tried it myself yet.

I just uploaded my Picasa2 code to GitHub (https://github.com/belltown/Roku-Picasa2). It was based on Chris Hoffman's original Picasa code with some bug-fixes and OAuth2 authentication added. Feel free to use the code if you wish to make any changes or to create a Google Photos channel (or start from scratch if the code looks too horrible).

Love the Picasa2 Channel...def +1 to the screensaver and now that Google has updated Google Photos, I see huge potential.

"belltown" wrote:
I plan to add a screensaver to my Picasa2 channel. Unfortunately, it may be a few weeks before I get to it. My computer broke, and I'm waiting for a new one to come from China, so I'm not doing any Roku development right now. Once it arrives and I finish off a couple of other projects, I'll get to work on it.

Belltown, thank you for making the picasa2 channel! Can you please add the screensaver function?? I've been waiting!

By popular demand, Picasa2 now has a screensaver!

From the Roku home screen, go to Settings>Screensaver>Screensaver, and select 'Picasa (v2)'. From there you can select Custom and specify either Featured Photos or Your Photos. If the Picasa2 channel has been run and authorized, the default is to display photos from your own Picasa Web Albums. It will also display photos from your Google Photos uploads.

https://my.roku.com/add/PICASA2

That's great news on the screensaver, thank you for your continued development belltown!


I admit it's a bit confusing sorting out the photos/videos available across Google's product set (Picasa Web Albums, Google Photos, Google Drive, Hangouts, etc).

Google Drive has a "Google Photos" folder/tab (sometimes auto-sorted in folders by year), but any file/folder organization there is not reflected in the view at the actual Google Photos site/app. Likewise any albums, photo edits, or the auto animations/collages/etc at Google Photos don't show up in the Google Drive view.

As far as Picasa Web Albums (both on the site and apps), it shows "Auto Backup" as well as any manual albums created at Google Photos (it also seems to show pictures sent/received from Google Hangouts sessions).

On the Picasa Web site, the "Auto Backup" album is organized into a separate sub-album for each day, and the deprecated "Instant Upload" album (which is empty most of the time) still shows up for some reason. But on the Picasa Roku channel, "Auto Backup" plays as one slideshow without sub-albums (more practical?), and there's no "Instant Upload".

Dude, that is awesome, thank you so much! Let us know if there's somewhere we can donate!