Nietha.net

Talk about a quick follow-up post, less than 24 hours later.

Thanks to people taking my blatant hint, I’ve now received a few pictures to my Momento digital picture frame that I recently purchased from Woot.

How’s it work? Nice and easily, thankfully. My main concern was that I wouldn’t be notified when I received new pics and secondly that I would have to go through the menu to specifically to see them. I’m happy to report that both of those concerns have been nullified.

I turned on my frame this morning and it told me I had received 4 new pictures! Sweet beans.

I hit OK and it started showing them. I hit the info button and there showed the Delete option, so that’s one question partially answered (I still don’t know if this option will show for photos on a memory card or USB drive stuck in the frame, but I don’t really care).

I cycled through the photos, and then switched back to my WMP11 picture playlist. It would have been nice if there was an easy way to add these new ‘live’ photos to my WMP library so that they wouldn’t have to remain separate. I did confirm that I could log into my Momento Live account and view the original photo online (and therefore save to my computer and add to my WMP library), as well as delete it.

Note that deleting from the website wasn’t all that intuitive - to delete a picture you click on it and then at the upper right-hand corner for all the pictures, you click on the X. When I first noticed this X I was like, “will it delete ALL the pictures I’ve received?” so was hesitant about clicking it, but when I got over it and had to test it out (hovering over the X to view the status line didn’t reveal anything useful) I got an alert that said I hadn’t selected any photos. Phew.

Stupidly, when I did choose to delete a picture, the confirmation pop-up box had a blank message. You’d think someone would have reported that by now so that they could fix it.

Curiously, choosing delete on my frame did not delete it from my ‘inbox’, so hopefully I won’t ever notice that a picture deleted this way will still be in rotation - I don’t know why the frame and the website wouldn’t be synced up, but I didn’t try logging out and in again. Not a big concern at this point however.

Since I was logged in, I did a bit more poking around on the site and discovered, lo and behold, I could grab pictures from Flickr! I was extremely happy… but found a big hindrance was that I couldn’t just put in a Flickr URL (ie my Flickr photos), you could only search by tags, keywords, or put in an RSS feed.

Obviously, the most useful of the 3 options was RSS feed since it was closest to what I wanted to do - browse ALL of someone’s photo stream. I copied my RSS feed link, plunked it in… and found it’s limited to the most recent 20 pictures. Dang it. Okay, fine, as long as you keep up to date with the feed, shouldn’t be an issue.

I spotted a ‘Set up PictureStream’ option which seemed promising.

Once I did save the feed I was pleased to discover that I could receive new pictures in the RSS feed to my frame automatically! Eureka!

Awesome, I quickly set that up for my photostream - anything I post on Flickr has already gone through my selection process since obviously the pics are the ones I’m choosing to share with my friends and family. I could keep this process in place, have my frame pick up my new pics automagically and not have to manually intervene! Forget WMP, if I left my frame on displaying ‘live’ photos, I’d have all my friends photos AND all of my photos. The only thing that would make it PERFECT was if I could add in ALL my Flickr photos easily.

Seriously missing the boat on this one, Momento - props for being able to connect to Flickr, but negative points for limiting that capability to RSS, tags and keywords.

Possibly negative points to Flickr for not having an ‘all pictures’ RSS feed? I have very limited experience with RSS, so if that’s just not really feasible, or if I missed that particular feed somewhere, feel free to let me know.

Okay, back to my progress with exploring all of Momento Live’s options - I was on cloud 9 pretty much. I was thinking I could go through the laborious process of sending my Flickr photos to my frame manually seeing as I have time on my hands… until… I noticed two important things:

1. All the pictures displaying from a Flickr RSS feed where not full-size… I’m guessing they’re the default size for when viewing a particular picture on Flickr. Not cool - all of them had black borders in my frame - what’s the point in having a 10″ display if it’s not displaying 10″ pictures. Thumbs down. Don’t know who to blame this one on, I’m guessing Flickr.
2. Pictures from a Flickr RSS feed were only public pictures… which I guess can be expected… but I post private photos a fair bit and almost all of Amber’s photos are private. I suppose just another reason why I would want Momento to have better integration with online photo services - tie my Momento Live account to my Flickr account and carry across those permissions.
   Note: If the Flickr PictureStreams did display in full-size, these two points would swap in importance.

Alright, so where does all this leave me in the end? Receiving new photos manually sent to me by people that I care about is indeed very nice, but I can see the novelty of emailing photos to my frame waning quickly - especially since they can’t see the end results.

Again, this would have been resolved by being able to tap into Flickr accounts directly (with the caveat of not getting the original photo size unless a workaround comes to light) and this roadblock is all the more frustrating now because the potential is there! Momento’s got a few steps in the right direction, and it’s so close! But I am more overall pleased with my purchase since there is at least some integration with Flickr.

I guess in an ideal world… in lieu of direct connection to a Flickr account… all my family and friends would have these frames (with the necessary wireless internet) so that we could all send each other pics so that it’d be a regular thing to do.