Android app released for preparing images for digital frames

[tipp0025]

I had made some posts here earlier about a mobile app being developed to manage the cropping, EXIF/IPTC metadata editing, and sharing of images to prep them for display on digital frames -- specifically custom frames using Raspberry Pis with picframe.

I'm happy to say the Android version has been approved by Google and is now available for free on the Play Store here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.technolab.metapi

Thanks to the community here for providing some helpful feedback when developing the app. I used picframe with my Raspberry Pi extensively during testing, and we even included a 'Pi3D' metadata preset to group the most commonly-used display tags. Hopefully some people here can find some use for it, as I noticed a lot of the alternatives aren't free or require multiple apps/platforms to accomplish everything.

We have an iOS version too, but there's still some more work to be done before submitting it to Apple for review. In the meantime, you can share any feedback in this thread, or email metapi.technolab@gmail.com. I plan on continuing to update and support the app, so any feedback is appreciated.

[paddywwoof]

@tipp0025 that looks very professional and easy to use. After a quick play with it there are a couple of things that occur to me:

1. Resizing... picframe scales large images down to the size of the monitor anyway so there's no point sending massive files. It would be greener to scale in the app. Just been listening to a podcast about a data center in Portugal with (eventually) 1.2GW power requirement. Portuguese households consume about 2.4GW in total.

Maybe you could have a target monitor WxH?

2. Location... It would be nice if the starting map was centered and scaled as the previous time you placed a pin. At the moment you have to start each time from beside the N1680Rd near Cimarron River, Oklahoma.

Anyway thanks for doing all this.

[tipp0025]

Thanks for trying it out! I'll take a look at monitor-related scaling within the app, because that's a good point I never considered.

As for the location -- the intended behaviour should be to only show a pin if a location is already present, and to show a zoomed-out view of Google Maps when there's nothing present (and awaiting user search input, or the 'current location' button).

Were you editing a picture with pre-existing GPS data from this location in Oklahoma? If not, that's an odd bug and I'll look more into that. Eventually I do want to add a feature for the user to set a default location if none exists. I can make sure the map scaling is consistent too, because that's an easy fix with the Google Maps API.

[paddywwoof]

The random place in Oklahoma is just where Google defaults. Maybe they still have more users in USA than anywhere else so it makes sense.

If you've taken the photo on your own phone, and you have location switched on then you don't really need to use the location editing! It IS really useful, however, for pictures from WhatsApp, emailed using Gmail, saved from the internet etc. i.e ones without location data.

For sequential use of the location function it is very probable the pin will need to go near the last one, only infrequently needing to move to another county or state.