Flickrfan and appleTV
Following along with a number of the Dave Winer followers, I grabbed his Flickrfan app and installed it. One difference for me, I’m feeding the images to an appleTV connected to a 46″ panel, and not via a Macmini.
Michael Markman has great instructions which had me up and running in just a few short minutes.
One think I noticed right off with the installer, is that it’s really Dave’s OPML editor. I expected the installer to be flickrfan.dmg, as opposed to opml.dmg. No sweat, though. It’s a beta.
Seems that Dave wrote this with the Macmini as the main output device, but maybe it’s really better suited for an appleTV? On the appleTV, each feed is it’s own slideshow, not just one. But we’ll see what else Dave has in mind.
Since I’m not shooting tons of amazing pictures (unlike Josh Hallet’s images) I added a feed from the graffiti tag. A little over 24 hours later, I have nearly 500 images, consuming nearly 500 MB. I changed my maximum number of images to keep to 500 so hopefully that keeps things in check. I think the default was a larger number.
A couple things I’d like to see added:
An option to only display horizontal images, useful when subscribed to a tag with mixed orientation. Not a deal killer, but I’d like to not see curtains on vertical images.
The url or user name displayed (not just in the Events page), again useful when not subscribed to your own images.
And there’s a lively discussion about feeds, enclosures, and rights. I was wondering many of the same things when I saw the AP photo feed. Not a copyright anywhere on the images, and they now live on my computer.
So yeah, flickrfan is worth a shot if you’ve got the Mac household/products. It is nice to have a steady flow of new images into the screensaver.
I wish I could subscribe to a set in flickr. Dan May’s “100 Squares” would be fantastic.
[update] – trying Last.fm and Flickrfan integration. Cheers to Joe Lazarus. This was enough to give it a shot:
All the photos include Creative Commons licenses and an attribution link back to the Flickr photo page, meaning I’m respecting the photographers’ permissions (something that I believe is currently missing from Dave’s standard feeds).