November Thumbnail demo (Patreon)

We're heads down in the final stretch for November working on polishing things up. For those in the alpha you've seen how rough my 'dev art' can be.  I've been spending the last few nights putting a polish on the thumbnail view in the Playlist Editor and wanted to show what that will look like.

What you'll notice is a nice fade in, loading spinners, and correct aspect ratios for thumbnails.  We actually detect the aspect ratio and adjust the UI accordingly.  

It takes a short bit to render these..this is a design decision that is ironically a result of our success.  One of the things we worked hard on in the beginning was making a system that could support thousands of image files. We made a ton of design and architecture decisions to support that, and we have had quite a few of you that have told us how delighted you were to throw tens of thousands of images and videos at the system and have it perform!

Well...that is awesome..until you try to make a thumbnail engine and realize that you can either try to thumbnail and store every single one in the background (takes up disk space, but improves loading time) or you dynamically load them 'on the fly'.  We went with the 'on the fly' approach for a number of reasons...one is that we don't want to thrash the SD cards on the pis as they can be finicky as it is.  The other is to prevent the gigs of storage, and we found that a pi can take a full day (!?) to thumbnail 10,000 pictures.

So...we did some crazy magic, optimized it, and ...it does it on the fly now :) We should have the same performance on 25 images as we do on 25,000 images.

 
The story with videos
To thumbnail videos, we need to use some third party tools.  We are very very careful to make sure we abide by open source (and all) license terms, and many of the tools that we would use have strict licenses which could affect our codebase. We are taking some time to make sure we do the right thing by the community and understand and abide by any license we use.  Since we run a Patreon, I consider us a commercial platform, and therefore it may cost us fees to be on the right side of the licenses.  We may find a way to do it using some free software, but we're not there yet.   I know the broken images for videos isn't the best, and I'll try to get it fixed by November release.

But..the playlist editor doesn't..edit anything?

I know, I know.  It's going to. We needed a place to put playlist creation and editing in, and we needed a way to allow for 'delete file' and 'play now' which were big community asks (as well as thumbnails of what was showing).  Now that we have the page, we can iterate on the UI and add a plus side for 'add to playlist', a way to name and save them, and an edit button to edit exif data right in the app.  Also since we can generate thumbnails now, we can do a 'now showing on frame' type feature for the main UI.  This was again a framework to build on....more to come.

December is all about the Exif stuff and overlay engines.  You'll see features added onto the playlist editor throughout the next few months, but we have a TON of work to get overlays working...and it's a big big ask.  Those wanting the 'now playing' movie poster stuff..we're going to blow your minds.   Those wanting flexability for adding 'date taken' or 'title, subject' type exif data....we hear you.  Those wanting to put the clock in the upper left, and the date in the upper right, but have differnet font sizes...we hear you.  

But first testing and wrap up for November!  Thankyou for supporting us, and hope you're as excited as we are for what's to come.

Also to all of you asking for the 'play this file now' button....now that I have done it and can see it in use..I'm sorry it took so long. You were right, it's awesome.

Next post should be release!