Comments on: Feeding a screensaver from the digikam database

By: Ben Klopfenstein

Ben Klopfenstein — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:23:56 +0000

You should be able to place the new version in /usr/local/bin – this will work as long as /usr/local/bin is in your path before /usr/bin (check echo $PATH) and the path to xscreensaver-getimage-digikam is not hardcoded anywhere, which it really shouldn’t be. This way you won’t have to rename or move any existing programs.

That said, a simple modification to this would be to have it read the good/bad tags and database location out of a .config file in the user’s home directory.

Great work!

By: Andreas Goelzer

Andreas Goelzer — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:35:38 +0000

I added a good_tags option, albeit very crudely. If someone knows of a clean way (and a fast one) to do the tag-filtering with joins, please tell me. Also, it now works with digikam for kde4, which uses a different database structure(i hope it still works for digikam for kde3, if the version variable is set correctly).

By: Andi

Andi — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:21:55 +0000

Hi Andreas,

great work! Exactly what I am looking for.
But is there a way to include something like “good tags”? So I would be able to add pics to the screensaver by just applying the to them in digikam?
That would be awsome!

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:26:36 +0000

Thanks! it worked as expected.

I had to install the xscreensaver package then run xscreensaver-demo so i could configure glslideshow. i wanted to turn off the panning and google didn’t tell me what else should be in the .xscreensaver file. It seems that gnome-screensaver includes/depends on glslideshow but not the means to configure it.

Any idea how to display the file path? in xscreensaver-demo i could only tell it to show the filename, and with names like img0001.jpg that’s not very helpful to me. all the info is in the directory structure.

I tried passing the path to osd_cat but the filename displayed didn’t seem to match the picture. My best guess is it prefetches the names (and possibly the files too).

By: Andreas Goelzer

Andreas Goelzer — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:49:41 +0000

You can try starting the program manually:

xscreensaver-getimage-file ~/Documents/Bilder

it should return a filename of an image, like

09:35:00 goelzera@prometheus:~$ xscreensaver-getimage-file ~/Documents/Bilder
/home/goelzera/Documents/Bilder/Merklingen/Vogelhaus 3/img_3816.jpg
09:35:00 goelzera@prometheus:~$

If it doesn’t, it will probably give you some python error(module not found, file not fould, failed to open database or so), if so, post that. If not i guess you’d better hardcode the directory into the file.

By: Nateloaf

Nateloaf — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:30:19 +0000

This is EXACTLY what I am looking for… I made the required modifications to the script, but no matter what, GLSlideshow just keeps showing some sort of test pattern logo thing (the default image). I have created the .xscreensaver file with the imageDirectory setting, but it appears to be ignored.

Any suggestions are most welcome…