Views from Phanfare CEO and Co-founder Andrew Erlichson
«
»

Link Turn your computer into a digital picture frame

We just released a Phanfare Windows Screensaver (Mac version coming soon from a Phanfare customer) that turns your computer into a digital picture frame. Here is how it works: You install the screensaver and it appears right along with other Windows Screensavers.

Configure the options for the screensaver and set it up with your Phanfare username and guest password, if you have one, and when your screen goes idle, it displays images from your Phanfare account.

This screensaver is the perfect way for Grandma to keep up with the kids. As you update your albums, your friends and family see your photos on their local computer without having to do anything more than lean back.
You can choose to have it pull your latest images, images at random, or images from a particular album (sorry, it does not serve video yet).

The screensaver was implemented using the Phanfare Public API.

TAGS: , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 1:05 am and is filed under Digital photography, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

  • Jacques
    Does this screen saver continuously access the hard disk while it operates?

    The reason I am asking is that I have my computer set up for the hard disk to sleep and for the monitor to go dark after a set time and I do not want this program to keep the disk spinning all night.
  • mikeli77
    I would like to be able to display most images from an assortment of sites. Lots of my friends use phanfare now and I'd like to pull images from their sites too.

    Also, it would be useful to run the screensaver as a standalone slideshow. I believe you can do this by executing *.SCR /s, but this isn't commonly known so a separate EXE would be great.
  • Andrew Erlichson
    Bob,

    Sorry for the late reply. The next version of the screensaver will handle multiple monitors correctly.


    Cristina,
    It picks up all albums that inherit their security from the table of contents. If you just protect your site with one password and the albums inherit that security, it should work.

    Steven,
    We are looking at ways to improve the install experience and provision it a bit during the installer.

    Andrew
  • Bob
    Awesome. I've been waiting for something like this. But I noticed a problem which may keep me from running it at work. When using 2 monitors, the secondary display is left active. It would be nice if it at least blanked it or even better, showed another picture in that display.

    One other enhancement would be to show the most recent album according to picture date. For example, I recently added a gallery of photos from over a year ago. I really don't want to see those now. Instead of I'd like to see a sample of recent images not recently uploaded images.
  • Cristina
    It should be noted before downloading that only albums without passwords will be used in the slideshow. This is probably best for most people, but all of my albums are password protected with the same password for the most part.
  • Steven
    Great! Been waiting for something like this.

    Just downloaded and installed. A couple of comments:

    * It would be really great if at the end of installation it asked the user if they wanted the Phanfare screensaver to be set as active screensaver - default answer would be yes.
    * Also if the settings came up automatically that would improve the install experience - I want my Mom to be able to do this easily.
    * The password is not covered with **** but rather is just shown - minor nit

    Very excited. Thanks!
blog comments powered by Disqus

    Back to Phanfare blog home »

© 2007-8 Phanfare, Inc.