Electronic photo album

I was looking at my broken electronic photo album (probably bad capacitor) and realized that the mark II form factor is not what I want. I’d like it to be a standard photo display on my shelf, but with all the voice interaction and every once in a while showing the weather/time.

I’m thinking of a scenario where I bunch of us are taking “your daughter sure looks like dad”, “oh no - hey mycroft show [my wife’s name] baby picture” see, she looks just like her mom. Until then it is completely unintrusive.

For this to work though it needs a larger screen in landscape orientation. The current form factor works for a bedside, but not a kitchen or living room. I’d back a couple of this. The mark II I’ve backed will be used someplace.

Might be able to take a Picroft, attach one of those small LCDs like some people use for watching DVDs in the back of a vehicle, do something similar to one of the many RPi photo frame projects on the web, and make a skill that finds the image you’re requesting and tells the photo frame software “display this file right now”. (There might even be nice RPi photo-frame-like enclosures out there already, I really don’t know.)

Could even extend it so that when it detects you’re asking for the weather it makes a “weather_report.png” image file for that and tells the photo part to display that image. Maybe auto-updating the image every so often and leaving it in the photo rotation as well?

The main issue I see is, how will it know what photo you want when you request one? Will it simply go by the filename closest to what you ask for? Something in the UserComment EXIF tags in the images? Some sort of database table? I wouldn’t know where to begin with how it determines which photo you’re asking for, perhaps someone else would have more idea though.

Digikam (kde project photos management) is a great tool for tagging and organizing pictures like that. Just need to pull the data from them somehow. (there are probably other tools that I don’t know about)