So here’s my situation. I’ve been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order.

I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 – it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting – but it’s not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album.

Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can’t randomize!

Any suggestions? I’m looking to host this on Debian.

  • @AnafrojEnglish
    26•11 months ago

    Solving it the unix way:

    ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -

    So it’s ls -1 to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it to sort, with the -R option to sort randomly, then piping the result to sxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it’s available on Debian). For its options : -f means it’s fullscreen, -s f makes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible, -S 5 tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and - is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from the ls and sort commands).

    This won’t work for videos, though, only pictures.