Photos: Browsing DLNA Servers - One step closer
This post is in series about my GSoC project: Browsing DLNA Media Servers in Photos.
If you checked out latest GNOME 3.13.3 release, you might have observed that gnome-online-accounts now has learned to set up access to the media servers in your local network as mentioned in this blog post by mclasen. Good to see one part of the project committed in this release.
I have been working for past few weeks on making this whole setup at least work and have finally able to make all of it work. I have a working media server miner that mines the content from added media server accounts in GOA. I have even taken care of the albums in this regard. Photos from your media servers are not thrown randomly into the tracker, rather their parent directory information comes along with photos. This makes it easy to view photos in the application in more organized way provided you have organized your photos well in your media server.
Here’s a screenshot that is showing photos in their albums according to the directory structure of the media server.
The albums you are seeing in above screenshot are directly taken from the media server directory information.
I have written a patch that adds a media-server extension to gnome-photos. Applying this patch would enable you to see media-server content in your gnome-photos application.
With this, I have been able to connect all the dots but there are still many issues that needs to be considered. Further, the setup requires testing to find bugs that might have crept in during the coding phase.
Performance issues
Performance in mining the media server content is one of the main issues right now. If you followed my previous post about the media server miner, I mentioned about searching for content in non searchable devices. I had to adopt a recursive directory by directory approach to mine contents in non searchable media servers. It currently takes around 6 to 7 seconds to mine photos from my android device (non searchable) having less than 100 photos currently and about 1.5 seconds on searchable devices (Rygel serving around 150 photos). I am currently working on adopting approaches that might serve as a performance boost in mining content especially for non searchable devices.
Design issues
There are few things that needs to be decided. Do we want to control our media server directly from the application ? For instance, delete and upload photo from/to media server. Or do we just want to make media servers read only for content applications ?
If you have any suggestion or query, you are most welcome to leave a comment.
Attending GUADEC - 2014
Last but not the least, I would like to thank GNOME Foundation and travel committee for sponsoring me to attend GUADEC - 2014. Excited to attend my first conference and meet you all there.
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