How to have an Ubuntu machine display a slideshow of the Flickr 'Interestingness' photos for that day?

October 19, 2006 1:52 PM

How to have an Ubuntu machine display a slideshow of the Flickr 'Interestingness' photos for that day?

I have an old PC with Ubuntu installed on it hooked up to my LCD TV in the living room on a high-speed internet connection. I would like to use this machine to (among other things) display a slideshow of that day's featured "Interestingess" photos from Flickr. Is there some feature on Flickr that will do this? Some utility I can use in Ubuntu? Other site that links into Flickr and does this? I don't know Python or any other programming. Help!

posted by mattholomew to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Ok, I don't have specifics for you because I'm a linux newbie myself but this path might lead you to results.

Get the perl script you need here (That script was made for OSX but I'm not sure it matters, maybe someone with more experience with programming might be able to chime in).

Then you want to execute that script automatically using crontab. See here for some info on setting that up.

Basically that gets your images downloaded to a folder. Then you use GLSlideshow screensaver setting the advanced properties to check that folder for images. See here for info on that.

I wish you luck and hopefully someone else with more experience in perl scripting and linux might be able to shed a bit more light on the issue. I'm sure what you want is possible, just not quite sure if what I've described will actually work.
posted by genial at 5:35 PM on October 19, 2006

I't's not quite the same thing, but webcollage, a module for xscreensaver which can be run on its own, is very compelling and pretty close to what you were after--but a bit more random. It's very configurable--if you're confortable editing scripts--and you could get it to grab from a subset of flickr. In the default configuration, it's perhaps a bit too random to be safe for work.
posted by cytherea at 8:23 PM on October 19, 2006

There is a 3rd-party RSS feed for the interestingness page. Plug the feed into an image viewer that can deal with RSS.

Can't find the site via Google at the moment, so it might be defunct.
posted by aerotive at 2:07 AM on October 20, 2006