Motivation

When I migrated my photo collection from google photos to a locally hosted instance of photoprism, I missed the automatically generated slideshow feature of google photos, here it is now.

How it works

The meta information of all images are read at startup and cached in memory. When the slideshow is opened, images from this calendar week from previous years are displayed. If no images from the calendar year are found, random images are displayed.

Run the application

Native execution

Download the latest release for your system from the releases page:

# Assuming you run a x86/x64 system, if not adjust the binary name to download 
LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -L -s -H 'Accept: application/json' https://github.com/RouHim/this-week-in-past/releases/latest | \
sed -e 's/.*"tag_name":"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/') && \
curl -L -o this-week-in-past https://github.com/RouHim/this-week-in-past/releases/download/$LATEST_VERSION/this-week-in-past-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl && \
chmod +x this-week-in-past

Create a folder to store the application data:

mkdir data

Start the application with:

RESOURCE_PATHS=/path/to/pictures \
DATA_FOLDER=data \
SLIDESHOW_INTERVAL=60 \
./this-week-in-past

Since the binary is compiled completely statically, there are no dependencies on system libraries like glibc.

Docker

Docker Example:

docker run -p 8080:8080 \
        -v /path/to/pictures:/resources \
        -e SLIDESHOW_INTERVAL=60 \
        -e WEATHER_ENABLED=true \
        -e OPEN_WEATHER_MAP_API_KEY=<YOUR_KEY> \
        -e BIGDATA_CLOUD_API_KEY=<YOUR_KEY> \
        rouhim/this-week-in-past

Docker compose example:

version: "3.9"

services:
  this-week-in-past:
    image: rouhim/this-week-in-past
    volumes:
      - /path/to/pictures:/resources:ro # mount read only
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      SLIDESHOW_INTERVAL: 10

Configuration

All configuration is done via environment variables:

Some parameters, as marked in the table, can be overwritten as URL parameter e.g.: http://localhost:8080/?SLIDESHOW_INTERVAL=10&SHOW_HIDE_BUTTON=false

Ignoring folders

There are two ways to ignore folders:

1. By ignore file: If a folder contains a file with the name specified in IGNORE_FOLDER_MARKER_FILES, the folder is ignored.
2. By folder name: If a folder name matches the regular expression specified in IGNORE_FOLDER_REGEX, the folder is ignored.

If a folder is ignored, all its sub-elements (files and folders) are also ignored.

Limitations

• Due to this issue of the image crate, there is currently no HEIC image support.

Performance

Example 1

• Hardware: i3-12100T, 3xWD_BLACK SN750 (RAID-Z1), 32GB RAM
• Photos: ~80k
• Indexing: 6 seconds
• Uncached slideshow change: < 1 second

Example 2

• Hardware: Raspberry Pi Model B, Class 10 SD Card, 1GHz (OC) 32-Bit arm/v6, 512MB RAM
• Photos: ~6k
• Indexing: 38 seconds
• Uncached slideshow change: ~7 seconds

Example 3

• Hardware: LG G3 (Android Smartphone), Internal Storage, Snapdragon 801 4C 32-Bit arm/v7, 3GB RAM
• Photos: ~8k
• Indexing: 50 seconds
• Uncached slideshow change: < 1 second

Indexing scales with storage performance

Slideshow change scales with CPU performance

Resources

• Compiling static Rust binaries - https://github.com/rust-cross/rust-musl-cross
• Weather API - https://openweathermap.org/api
• Resolve Geo coordinates - https://www.bigdatacloud.com
• IntelliJ IDEA - https://www.jetbrains.com/idea
• Serving ML at the speed of Rust - https://shvbsle.in/serving-ml-at-the-speed-of-rust
• The Rust Performance Book - https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/#the-rust-performance-book