Loop pictures from a folder and display fullscreen slideshow

Question

Need a Linux solution for looped slideshow from pictures in some folder. Pictures may be deleted and added, so it's a bonus if it doesn't stop/crash if currently shown picture is deleted.

Answer 1

This is going to sound crazy, but it works (better than I expected even) and is not that hard to setup. The idea is to make your viewing program look at a single file and then have a command line process that copies each of your files in your directory to that file you view. I tested this with Geeqie and gthumb and it actually works pretty well. gthumb even can handle the image being updated every second and both supported the name of the file type being different from the actual file type (jpg, png, gif, etc).

So here is what you do:

1. Make a directory with only your pictures in them.
2. open a terminal window and change to the directory made in the previous step.

3. Run this command, substituting 5 with however many seconds you want to wait in between updates.

   while true ; do for i in * ; do cp $i ~/slideshow.jpg ; echo $i ; sleep 5 ; done ; done
   

4. Open gthumb and view the image in your home directory called slideshow.jpg, it should rotate the picture. You can make gthumb full screen now if you need to.

5. Try adding and removing pictures from the picture directory. It won't actually update until its finished going through the whole directory each time, but it will update. The echo $i is in there just so you can see what picture it just copied into place each time.

When you are ready to stop the slideshow, you can press Ctrl-C in the terminal window.

Answer 2

If you use Gnome desktop, then you can use its official image viewer program for slide shows:

eog --slide-show /path/to/picture_directory

With Eog pictures can be removed or added during the slide show. Actually, if you add picture during the slide show, it will be automatically included.

Answer 3

Try out Gthumb: http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/home.html