What the RasPad Can Do - Image Viewer?

Did you ever wonder if you could use your RasPad3 as an image viewer? The answer is certainly, YES.

What follows is an example of a fairly advanced project which you could put on your RasPad3 to show your photos. It is not a tutorial but, rather, a Python script which could adapt as you wish.

- a RasPad3 (actually you can run it on your PC or Mac as well).

- a Raspberry Pi 4 installed in the RasPad case. You will probably find that any version of Raspberry Pi 4 will work just fine but remember that earlier versions of the Raspberry Pi will not work in the RasPad3.

- A basic knowledge of the Python language. (In actual fact, you can use if without knowing anything about the Python language, as long as you can follow directions and don’t try to change it!)

- a USB drive to hold the Python script and the directories holding .jpg images. This needn’t be very large. I have over 65 image folders which hold over 7000 images on my RasPad3 and all of that requires just over 9 GB on my USB drive. The USB drive I am using is a relatively small at 16 GB. I recommend that you select a USB 3 compatible drive because that will load images faster. Note that the script, as it stands, will not display .png or other image forms.

The following assumes that you will do the preparation of the files on a PC or a Mac, but, of course, if you know how to do that on your RasPad3, you can do that.

1. Download the slides.zip file
2. Put the file at the root of a USB drive
3. Uncompress the file using 7-Zip or some other un-zipping utility to extract the contents. This will create a slides directory and within that direcrtory will be the Python script (Slideshow.py), a requirements.txt file and two directories (also called folders) holding sample images.
4. If you have .jpg photos of your own to show, place them in other directories in the same directory as the Slideshow.py file. Make sure that your directory names and the image names do not include any spaces. Use underscores or dashes to separate words, if necesssary. Also be sure that the photos are fairly large (say, for instance, over 1000 by 1000 pixels). The very small photos which can be downloaded from the internet will be assumed to be thumbnails and will be ignored.
5. Transfer the USB drive to the RasPad3 and power up the RasPad3.
6. to be continued
7. - how to install the required Python packages - Pillow
8. – how to steer Python interpreter to the script and
9. - how to run it.
10. If the program is running correctly and the photos are being displayed, you can delete the sample directories, if you like, leaving only your own images to be displayed.
11. It is possible to change the parameters of the script, such as the time each photo is displayed or the display of .png images, but that would require you to do some brain surgery to the Python script and is beyond the scope of this example script.

Ps. This project is built by one of our Raspad users, he is a retired electronic circuit engineer and not a specialized software programmer but have studied Python and the Raspberry Pi OS over the past year.

Thanks for sharing this project.

Credit: @Glenson Jones