Got the frame today and set it up and it is now showing images from one of my Smugmug galleries. It all works! It took my about two hours to figure it all out (get it on my WiFi network, configure it to display photos from an RSS feed, then enter the feed URL right, then limit my gallery to XL). I don't think it should have taken two hours, but it did. Anyway, once I got all the correct config info in and limited my gallery to XL display size, it all started working.
I think the frame may have been choking on my large 12MP images when it tried to download originals via the feed. When I changed the max display size to XL (which changes the feed to use the XL size too), then it started working. That took a little troubleshooting since there's not much in the way of diagnostic info from the frame.
My wife got a wifi MemoryFrame for Christmas (MF-8104). I had no problems at all getting it connected to my wireless network, but after painfully entering in the URL to my SmugMug gallery's RSS feed, I can't figure out how to make the frame let me tell it to run its show from the RSS feed instead of one of the 3 stock online sources (ie., Webshots, Flickr, Live Spaces).
Any words of wisdom to save me a few hours of frustration?
SmugMug + MemoryFrame (MF-8104) via RSS
Ok, it looks like I've got it figured it out finally. The dgrin wiki threw me off for a long while because all of the examples used the atom03 format.
Once I did that, when I went to play the slideshow from a web sharing site, the photo frame included the name of my SmugMug gallery in the list.
It's still in the process of downloading the pics and I'm not sure if I need everything in the URL above yet. Once I 100% confirm this as working, I'll filter out the extraneous stuff and update this post.
*** Update: Doesn't ever seem to finish off the "Retrieving media... please wait" message and actually display pictures. Progress, but not there yet...
From going through this process, I've got a couple of enhancement requests for SmugMug, but I'll go put those in the appropriate forum.
Wow, what a nightmare! I was never able to get this to work via an RSS feed direct from SmugMug. I finally got it to work by redirecting the SmugMug RSS feed through FrameChannel, but even that had problems to figure out.
Some notes in case the developers want to take a look at why SmugMug RSS and Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame don't play nice:
* Must use format=rss200, not atom03. All of the examples in the wiki use atom03, so that's what folks will tend to try first. If you try to use atom03, the RSS feed won't show up in the list of available feeds to even try to play from.
* Including or excluding MediaRSS=0 didn't seem to affect things at all.
* After you give up in despair from trying different combinations with using SmugMug for the RSS feed and set it up under FrameChannel, right now you must use http://api.smugmug.com/*, not [URL="http://"]http://[/URL][nickname].smugmug.com. No clue what the different between the two sources is, but in the end, I could only make it work via api.smugmug.com. As a software developer, this particular part smells like a bug on the SmugMug side of things.
Nominally I would have assumed the blame was purely in the MemoryFrame (because the software in it is really lousy), but I was able to get things working in FrameChannel other than SmugMug RSS feeds much easier than getting the SmugMug feed to work.
Ok, ignoring all of that, for those trying to make this bloody thing work, here's what finally did it for me:
1) Setup an account on http://www.framechannel.com. It's free and you can setup a channel that points to your SmugMug RSS feed.
2) Create a channel - type is Custom RSS Image Feed. Here's what I plugged into the RSS URL field:
This will setup a feed from your galleries on photo's with the keyword of "photoframe". There are different ways of doing this, but in the end, this seems to be pretty elegant (would have been really elegant if we didn't have to bounce through FrameChannel like this!).
3) On your MemoryFrame, configure the RSS Feed Info field with the URL from "My Feed Address" on your FrameChannel account. In my case, it looked like:
If anyone is looking for recommendations, unless you just absolutely must have the ability to remotely update photos for your parents or grandparents, save yourself some cash and lots of frustration and just get a digital photo frame that reads from a CF card. The wifi ones aren't ready for primetime yet.
The frame is configured through dlink.framechannel.com
They claim you can configure everything remotely via framechannel if you give it as a gift. But framechannel does not support smugmug by default. You have to set up a custom RSS feed, which sounds kind of painful after reading this thread.
It has both wifi and ethernet connectivity and supports WPA2.
It has a sensor to turn itself on and off when no one is in the room.
If someone has one and could let me know whether the framechannel method of accessing smugmug galleries is workable, I'll buy one <g>.
OK, I've done as complete a survey as I can of all the wireless digital photo frames without actually buying anything (to try to figure out what to buy). Here's my brief run-down and I'd like to know if anyone is successfully using a Digital Spectrum wifi frame with a Smugmug RSS feed?
Right now, it looks like this market space is very immature. Photovu owns the high end, has a great web-site, seems like they provide good support and you can talk to someone if you need to. But, the Photovu products are very expensive (as someone pointed out, they cost more than a typical laptop).
The only other player with something larger than a 10" display is Digital Spectrum. It sounds like they are a bit hit or miss. Some folks have had decent experiences and others have had problems and had trouble getting support and getting a person to talk to. It sounds like they have the right RSS support to pull photos from Smugmug, but I'd love to hear confirmation of that.
For a smaller screen, I trust that the Kokak products are probably decent, but I can't tell if they only work with Kodak gallery or if they have good, generic RSS feed support.
eStarling looks promising on paper, but the Amazon reviews are really not favorable. It does specifically mention Smugmug RSS support. The largest frame they make is 8" which is smaller than I was looking for.
I would avoid Momento and Samsung at the moment. There's just no detailed product info on the web for Momento that it feels just like a marketing company. Samsung only has one frame and the only reports I could find on it said it had serious bugs.
SmartParts has introduced a 32inch frame but I cannot find any real details on it .......
Can these frames be hung & used vertically??
edit: after a lot of search finally found this at AMAZON....,, SmartParts 32" Digital Photo Frame.......$749.99.....unfortunately it doesn't seem to be wifi enabled.....will of course read off most of the cards out there.........
I would be very careful with the SHOGO. The terms of use contain the following clause:
By submitting, uploading, posting or displaying Content on or through ShogoLive, you hereby grant RealEase (and its successors and assigns) a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable licence under your copyrights or other intellectual property rights in such Content to:
reproduce, adapt, distribute, display, publish, create derivative works from, and use such Content in any manner (in whole or part) without any duty to account to you through the ShogoLive (including but not limited to RSS or other content feeds offered through ShogoLive) and other RealEase's services; and
authorize the downloading and printing of such Content, or any portion thereof, by other end users for their personal use.<hr> Subject to RealEase's then current Content-related policies, you may remove the Content you have uploaded or posted on or through the ShogoLive from time to time. After the relevant Content is removed from ShogoLive, RealEase will use its reasonable endeavours to cease to use such Content (under the licence granted under this section) within a commercially reasonable period.
The frame is configured through dlink.framechannel.com
They claim you can configure everything remotely via framechannel if you give it as a gift. But framechannel does not support smugmug by default. You have to set up a custom RSS feed, which sounds kind of painful after reading this thread.
It has both wifi and ethernet connectivity and supports WPA2.
It has a sensor to turn itself on and off when no one is in the room.
If someone has one and could let me know whether the framechannel method of accessing smugmug galleries is workable, I'll buy one <g>.
SmartParts has introduced a 32inch frame but I cannot find any real details on it .......
[snip]
edit: after a lot of search finally found this at AMAZON....,, SmartParts 32" Digital Photo Frame.......$749.99.....unfortunately it doesn't seem to be wifi enabled.....will of course read off most of the cards out there.........
WARNING/UPDATE (in case anyone is still interested...it's been a while):
SmartParts doesn't seem to exist anymore, according to this news link.
I came here looking for that too.
I was checking out the Kodak Pulse, but it doesn't appear to be RSS capable, so I don't think it would work with SmugMug.
Anyone else who have any good recommendations for a 10"+ WiFi capable digital frame that can do RSS?
I came here looking for that too.
I was checking out the Kodak Pulse, but it doesn't appear to be RSS capable, so I don't think it would work with SmugMug.
Anyone else who have any good recommendations for a 10"+ WiFi capable digital frame that can do RSS?
This thread's been around for a long time. I'm wondering about the current RSS photo frame options.
I come from Phanfare, where I've used connected photo frames for several years:
Frame #1 (died in 2011)
Kodak EasyShare. I bought this back when FrameChannel was around. Several frames at the time had FrameChannel built in. It was a great service, but they couldn't make money, so they went out of business. I used Phanfare with FrameChannel. When FrameChannel shut down, I was fortunate that the Kodak EasyShare also supported PhotoRSS, so I could keep using it after FrameChannel went under. I don't think Kodak makes frames anymore.
Frame #2 (died in 2017)
I currently have a Pix-Star frame that died a few weeks ago.
Pix-Star connects with a lot of services through their APIs.
Pix-Star also supports Photo RSS
When I got the Pix-Star, I used it with Phanfare RSS feeds. It used to work relatively well. Sometimes it wouldn't update the RSS feed and I had to contact support. In the last few years, Pix-Star changed the RSS implementation and it didn't work as well. Originally, their website connected with the RSS feed and the photo frame connected to the Pix-Star website to get the pictures. They changed it so that the frame can connect directly to the RSS feed now (it kind of makes business sense: you're not paying for the service, just the frame, but they're providing free hosting to their customers. If your frame can get it directly, it's less problem for them. If you put an RSS feed on the Pix-Star website, it just grabs a one-time snapshot; it doesn't update.
Anyway, I found that Pix-Star wasn't working well with my Phanfare RSS feeds and had several discussions with support about it. Basically, they said that Phanfare isn't providing a good feed. Well, I read the PhotoRSS spec and compared Phanfare's output with the spec, and found that Phanfare conformed just fine with the spec. It was Pix-Star that was expecting some information that the spec didn't contain (they wanted a .jpg at the end of every photo). Support never would respond to my facts about the spec; they blamed Phanfare. Apps like John's Background Switcher also worked just find with the Phanfare RSS feed. Therefore, my Phanfare RSS stopped working I could still use my frame by connecting to my Phanfare account (via the Pix-Star website) and selecting specific albums to show. It wasn't perfect, but it worked.
Then Carbonite decided to kill of Phanfare and sent us to SmugMug. I haven't had success with Pix-Star on SmugMug:
The Pix-Star website can't load my SmugMug account, Apparently, I have too many galleries and it times out trying to download the gallery titles. I contacted Pix-Star support about this, and they blamed SmugMug for not working properly. I see a theme from Pix-Star that I don't like: "it's someone else's problem, not ours."
I don't care for SmugMug's RSS implementation because it has to be public. Phanfare's worked much better because I didn't have to make an RSS feed public. Therefore, I haven't tried out SmugMug's RSS feeds on Pix-Star.
Anyway, I'm starting to look for a new frame that works with SmugMug. If anyone has success with one, that would be good to know. I have several thousand galleries, which is a problem with Pix-Star.
If you can get Pix-Star to work with SmugMug: it's been a nice frame, but I'm not thrilled with their support. I don't know why it died on me, as it's been pretty reliable.
I know it's not a picture frame, but yesterday evening I was messing around between program streamings on my Amazon Fire TV Stick and streamed stuff from my SmugMug site using the SM app for Amazon Fire. It was astonishingly fast and boy, did the pictures ever look good on the big-screen tv! Letting those photos stream during a party would really be an eye-catcher.
Thanks for your thoughts on the Amazon Fire TV stick. It's not a bad idea. They're not too expensive, so maybe I should pick up one and play with it. I could just have a bigger picture frame.
And maybe if the SmugMug app works well, I could pick up a tablet, put the SmugMug app on it, and set it on a plate holder. I'm not sure if the screen would stay illuminated, though.
Comments
My wife got a wifi MemoryFrame for Christmas (MF-8104). I had no problems at all getting it connected to my wireless network, but after painfully entering in the URL to my SmugMug gallery's RSS feed, I can't figure out how to make the frame let me tell it to run its show from the RSS feed instead of one of the 3 stock online sources (ie., Webshots, Flickr, Live Spaces).
Any words of wisdom to save me a few hours of frustration?
Thanks!
Jay
Ok, it looks like I've got it figured it out finally. The dgrin wiki threw me off for a long while because all of the examples used the atom03 format.
In the end, here's what worked for me:
[URL="http://"]http://[/URL][nickname].smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=[galleryID]&format=rss200&Size=Large&MediaRSS=0&ImageCount=99
Once I did that, when I went to play the slideshow from a web sharing site, the photo frame included the name of my SmugMug gallery in the list.
It's still in the process of downloading the pics and I'm not sure if I need everything in the URL above yet. Once I 100% confirm this as working, I'll filter out the extraneous stuff and update this post.
*** Update: Doesn't ever seem to finish off the "Retrieving media... please wait" message and actually display pictures. Progress, but not there yet...
From going through this process, I've got a couple of enhancement requests for SmugMug, but I'll go put those in the appropriate forum.
Hope this helps,
Jay
Some notes in case the developers want to take a look at why SmugMug RSS and Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame don't play nice:
* Must use format=rss200, not atom03. All of the examples in the wiki use atom03, so that's what folks will tend to try first. If you try to use atom03, the RSS feed won't show up in the list of available feeds to even try to play from.
* Including or excluding MediaRSS=0 didn't seem to affect things at all.
* After you give up in despair from trying different combinations with using SmugMug for the RSS feed and set it up under FrameChannel, right now you must use http://api.smugmug.com/*, not [URL="http://"]http://[/URL][nickname].smugmug.com. No clue what the different between the two sources is, but in the end, I could only make it work via api.smugmug.com. As a software developer, this particular part smells like a bug on the SmugMug side of things.
Nominally I would have assumed the blame was purely in the MemoryFrame (because the software in it is really lousy), but I was able to get things working in FrameChannel other than SmugMug RSS feeds much easier than getting the SmugMug feed to work.
Ok, ignoring all of that, for those trying to make this bloody thing work, here's what finally did it for me:
1) Setup an account on http://www.framechannel.com. It's free and you can setup a channel that points to your SmugMug RSS feed.
2) Create a channel - type is Custom RSS Image Feed. Here's what I plugged into the RSS URL field:
api.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=userkeyword&NickName=[YOUR-NICKNAME]&Data=photoframe&format=rss200&Size=Large&MediaRSS=0
This will setup a feed from your galleries on photo's with the keyword of "photoframe". There are different ways of doing this, but in the end, this seems to be pretty elegant (would have been really elegant if we didn't have to bounce through FrameChannel like this!).
3) On your MemoryFrame, configure the RSS Feed Info field with the URL from "My Feed Address" on your FrameChannel account. In my case, it looked like:
http://www.framechannel.com/feeds/feed.php?user=USERID&pin=PIN-NUMBER
If anyone is looking for recommendations, unless you just absolutely must have the ability to remotely update photos for your parents or grandparents, save yourself some cash and lots of frustration and just get a digital photo frame that reads from a CF card. The wifi ones aren't ready for primetime yet.
Jay
http://www.wirelesspictureframe.com/2008/01/07/shogo-will-introduce-wireless-digital-picture-frame-at-ces/
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=654
The frame is configured through dlink.framechannel.com
They claim you can configure everything remotely via framechannel if you give it as a gift. But framechannel does not support smugmug by default. You have to set up a custom RSS feed, which sounds kind of painful after reading this thread.
It has both wifi and ethernet connectivity and supports WPA2.
It has a sensor to turn itself on and off when no one is in the room.
If someone has one and could let me know whether the framechannel method of accessing smugmug galleries is workable, I'll buy one <g>.
SmartParts has introduced a 32inch frame but I cannot find any real details on it .......
Can these frames be hung & used vertically??
edit: after a lot of search finally found this at AMAZON....,,
SmartParts 32" Digital Photo Frame.......$749.99.....unfortunately it doesn't seem to be wifi enabled.....will of course read off most of the cards out there.........
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
perhaps a generator program where you choose some options and give it a gallery or keyword. hmm that sounds like a fun little application...
-Marilyn Monroe
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FWIW, I just setup another Digital Spectrum photoframe with the instructions I posted last December (http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=711949&postcount=34) and it worked fine.
In fact, with the newer firmware on the frame, it knows about FrameChannel so the setup is a bit easier than configuring a custom RSS feed.
Jay
</g>
WARNING/UPDATE (in case anyone is still interested...it's been a while):
SmartParts doesn't seem to exist anymore, according to this news link.
I was checking out the Kodak Pulse, but it doesn't appear to be RSS capable, so I don't think it would work with SmugMug.
Anyone else who have any good recommendations for a 10"+ WiFi capable digital frame that can do RSS?
Cheers!
Also looking for the same type of frame. The pix star fotoconnect is wi-fi capable and works with smugmug. I am considering getting it as it's ranked number one here: http://wireless-digital-frames-review.toptenreviews.com/
Does anyone here have experience with it? Or recommend a good frame with wifi? Screen size isn't really a problem as long as it works with smugmug.
Thanks
Another though is to buy a smaller TV and attach a Chromecast with the Smugmug app on it. Can you have photos play at random with the Chromecast app?
This thread's been around for a long time. I'm wondering about the current RSS photo frame options.
I come from Phanfare, where I've used connected photo frames for several years:
Frame #1 (died in 2011)
Kodak EasyShare. I bought this back when FrameChannel was around. Several frames at the time had FrameChannel built in. It was a great service, but they couldn't make money, so they went out of business. I used Phanfare with FrameChannel. When FrameChannel shut down, I was fortunate that the Kodak EasyShare also supported PhotoRSS, so I could keep using it after FrameChannel went under. I don't think Kodak makes frames anymore.
Frame #2 (died in 2017)
I currently have a Pix-Star frame that died a few weeks ago.
When I got the Pix-Star, I used it with Phanfare RSS feeds. It used to work relatively well. Sometimes it wouldn't update the RSS feed and I had to contact support. In the last few years, Pix-Star changed the RSS implementation and it didn't work as well. Originally, their website connected with the RSS feed and the photo frame connected to the Pix-Star website to get the pictures. They changed it so that the frame can connect directly to the RSS feed now (it kind of makes business sense: you're not paying for the service, just the frame, but they're providing free hosting to their customers. If your frame can get it directly, it's less problem for them. If you put an RSS feed on the Pix-Star website, it just grabs a one-time snapshot; it doesn't update.
Anyway, I found that Pix-Star wasn't working well with my Phanfare RSS feeds and had several discussions with support about it. Basically, they said that Phanfare isn't providing a good feed. Well, I read the PhotoRSS spec and compared Phanfare's output with the spec, and found that Phanfare conformed just fine with the spec. It was Pix-Star that was expecting some information that the spec didn't contain (they wanted a .jpg at the end of every photo). Support never would respond to my facts about the spec; they blamed Phanfare. Apps like John's Background Switcher also worked just find with the Phanfare RSS feed. Therefore, my Phanfare RSS stopped working
I could still use my frame by connecting to my Phanfare account (via the Pix-Star website) and selecting specific albums to show. It wasn't perfect, but it worked.
Then Carbonite decided to kill of Phanfare and sent us to SmugMug. I haven't had success with Pix-Star on SmugMug:
Anyway, I'm starting to look for a new frame that works with SmugMug. If anyone has success with one, that would be good to know. I have several thousand galleries, which is a problem with Pix-Star.
If you can get Pix-Star to work with SmugMug: it's been a nice frame, but I'm not thrilled with their support. I don't know why it died on me, as it's been pretty reliable.
I know it's not a picture frame, but yesterday evening I was messing around between program streamings on my Amazon Fire TV Stick and streamed stuff from my SmugMug site using the SM app for Amazon Fire. It was astonishingly fast and boy, did the pictures ever look good on the big-screen tv! Letting those photos stream during a party would really be an eye-catcher.
Thanks for your thoughts on the Amazon Fire TV stick. It's not a bad idea. They're not too expensive, so maybe I should pick up one and play with it. I could just have a bigger picture frame.
And maybe if the SmugMug app works well, I could pick up a tablet, put the SmugMug app on it, and set it on a plate holder. I'm not sure if the screen would stay illuminated, though.