Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

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dbk
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Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

Apologies for the length of this post.

I have been playing around with several different slideshow/screensavers. They all have positive attributes, but fall short of what I am looking for. For example, "Random Photo Screensaver" does most of what I want, but cannot display landscape/portrait images on corresponding dual monitors. I found that gPhotoShow comes closest, in terms of being able to play, reasonably well, a random (emphasis added) slideshow on dual monitors in both landscape and portrait format. I especially like the scroll function for panoramic images, which came as an (unexpected) added bonus.

Some observations on my experience so far:

From my Acer R7 laptop, I am running one Dell monitor (U2515H: 2560 x 1440) in landscape mode, and a second Dell monitor (U2417H: 1080 x 1920) in portrait mode. It took many many hours of experimentation to get anything to work, only after I finally figured out that monitor numbering in the FILTERS module does not correspond to the monitor numbering in Windows (very last FAQ point #43!). The other source of frustration was that I started out trying to run a SEQUENTIAL slideshow in landscape & portait mode, which (still) does not not produce a satisfactory result. (More on that later.)

Some issues:

The filter module is supposed to allow for display of vertical images on the 'portrait monitor' and horizontal images on the 'landscape monitor'. I have had mixed results so far. It does this reasonably well when running a random slideshow, but I found that when working with one particular folder, about 5-10% of the images in the same folder -- produced in the same series from the same camera -- refuse to display correctly for no apparent reason: i.e. portrait images get displayed on the landscape monitor and landscape images get displayed on the portrait monitor. The images concerned are clearly portrait or clearly landscape (there is no ambiguity). In another specific folder, the dual monitor setup did not work at all (all portrait/landscape images got displayed on one monitor or the other).

QUESTION 1: Do you have any idea of why this "display mismatch" is happening consistently with certain images (and/or certain folders), and how the problem can be fixed? Is there any way to troubleshoot the problem, looking for patterns a file log etc.? (NB: I already tried using the additional height/width filters, to no avail.) The reason I bought gPhotoShow was to avoid having to tag images as being portrait or landscape, or placing them in separate folders. I would like it to work consistently with all images.

* * *

I've also had mixed results trying to get a truly random 'comprehensive' slideshow -- there seems to be a bias towards selection/exclusion of certain folders or images -- but I'm still experimenting with this in the FILE OPTIONS settings.

QUESTION 2: Am I right in thinking that the software places an upper limit of 3500 or 4000 images in its random selection?

* * *

Suggestions for improvement:

1. The "Delay between images" is set within the IMAGES module, meaning that it applies to ALL monitors. It would be extremely helpful if the delay (display) period could be set INDEPENDENTLY for each monitor.

QUESTION 3: Is it technically possibly to code that basic functionality?

2. From my limited experience, I find that a big part of getting gPhotoShow to work properly depends on regularly clearing the cache. This is presently done, not so conveniently, within the FILE OPTIONS module. I would like to suggest moving or adding a "CLEAR CACHE" button alongside "LOAD, SAVE, PREVIEW, TOOLS..."

* * *

Last, but not least, I would like to describe what I am looking for in the IDEAL slideshow/screensaver, but still have not found in gPhotoShow (or anywhere else):

I would like to play a SEQUENTIAL slideshow, containing a mixture of landscape and portrait images, all displayed correctly (i.e. horizontally or vertically, and in sequence) on their respective monitors. The problem, of course, is that there are often far fewer portrait photos than landscapes -- perhaps a ratio of 1: 3 or 4.

My initial experimentation with a "sequential" gPhotoShow slideshow was inevitably frustrating: the landscape images display more or less sequentially on one monitor, while Portrait images are slotted in, out of order, on the other monitor -- giving the overall appearance of a "random" slideshow.

I would like to be able to play all of the slideshow images in correct sequence, on two monitors. In practice, this would require a longer display period for portrait images (since there are fewer of them), and relatively shorter display for landscape images. (My first suggestion above refers.) Most importantly, to keep the correct sequence, the "Portrait monitor" might have to continue to display its image until after a number of "Landscape" images have finished displaying on the other monitor. Perhaps this could be achieved by allowing, as necessary, for "VARIABLE" display periods: i.e. display periods that are not defined precisely -- but rather in terms of a certain "range" (in seconds) to give the required flexibility? I realise this might be a little tricky to code, but I note that the existing "Panorama" module already seems to builds in similar latency: whereby the other monitor waits until the panorama has finished scrolling before displaying its image.

I hope what I have described above is clear. It's a fairly straightforward request to display images in correct sequence, in the correct orientation, taking full advantage of the opportunity provided by a dual monitor set-up.

QUESTION 4: If this is technically possible to code, is this idea something you could contemplate in a future version of gPhotoShow?? If not, I really hope you can at least allow for each monitor to have an independent display time, which would go some way to addressing the problem of imbalance in numbers between portrait and landscape images.

Thanks for your time.
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gpb
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by gpb »

Hello,
first of all thank you very much for your feedback about gPhotoShow Pro
dbk wrote: QUESTION 1: Do you have any idea of why this "display mismatch" is happening consistently with certain images (and/or certain folders), and how the problem can be fixed? Is there any way to troubleshoot the problem, looking for patterns a file log etc.? (NB: I already tried using the additional height/width filters, to no avail.) The reason I bought gPhotoShow was to avoid having to tag images as being portrait or landscape, or placing them in separate folders. I would like it to work consistently with all images.
This is probably a bug, after your message I did some tests with my images and I think found the cause of this issue. gPhotoShow uses two different components to get exif information, on some images they don't agree about orientation, now I tried to use the same used to rotate images it seems to work. Please download the following updated version and let me know if it works better:
http://www.gphotoshow.com/files/gpsprosetup-917.exe
dbk wrote: I've also had mixed results trying to get a truly random 'comprehensive' slideshow -- there seems to be a bias towards selection/exclusion of certain folders or images -- but I'm still experimenting with this in the FILE OPTIONS settings.

QUESTION 2: Am I right in thinking that the software places an upper limit of 3500 or 4000 images in its random selection?
gPhotoShow is able to handle millions of files, randomization function is a standard Mersenne Twister algorithm well tested and implemented in gPhotoShow many years ago. What can cause the effect you noticed is the weighted randomization, in gPhotoShow there is a number on the right of each folder, normally it is 1 but if it higher it means files inside that folder are displayed more often.

* * *
dbk wrote: Suggestions for improvement:

1. The "Delay between images" is set within the IMAGES module, meaning that it applies to ALL monitors. It would be extremely helpful if the delay (display) period could be set INDEPENDENTLY for each monitor.

QUESTION 3: Is it technically possibly to code that basic functionality?
Technically it is possible, internally each monitor has its own timing so it should not be difficult to implement.
dbk wrote: 2. From my limited experience, I find that a big part of getting gPhotoShow to work properly depends on regularly clearing the cache. This is presently done, not so conveniently, within the FILE OPTIONS module. I would like to suggest moving or adding a "CLEAR CACHE" button alongside "LOAD, SAVE, PREVIEW, TOOLS..."
This is quite strange, normally gPhotoShow should clear the cache when you change settings that affects the cache. If it doesn't happen it is a bug. Do you remember a case where the cache is not cleared ?
dbk wrote: Last, but not least, I would like to describe what I am looking for in the IDEAL slideshow/screensaver, but still have not found in gPhotoShow (or anywhere else):

I would like to play a SEQUENTIAL slideshow, containing a mixture of landscape and portrait images, all displayed correctly (i.e. horizontally or vertically, and in sequence) on their respective monitors. The problem, of course, is that there are often far fewer portrait photos than landscapes -- perhaps a ratio of 1: 3 or 4.

My initial experimentation with a "sequential" gPhotoShow slideshow was inevitably frustrating: the landscape images display more or less sequentially on one monitor, while Portrait images are slotted in, out of order, on the other monitor -- giving the overall appearance of a "random" slideshow.

I would like to be able to play all of the slideshow images in correct sequence, on two monitors. In practice, this would require a longer display period for portrait images (since there are fewer of them), and relatively shorter display for landscape images. (My first suggestion above refers.) Most importantly, to keep the correct sequence, the "Portrait monitor" might have to continue to display its image until after a number of "Landscape" images have finished displaying on the other monitor. Perhaps this could be achieved by allowing, as necessary, for "VARIABLE" display periods: i.e. display periods that are not defined precisely -- but rather in terms of a certain "range" (in seconds) to give the required flexibility? I realise this might be a little tricky to code, but I note that the existing "Panorama" module already seems to builds in similar latency: whereby the other monitor waits until the panorama has finished scrolling before displaying its image.

I hope what I have described above is clear. It's a fairly straightforward request to display images in correct sequence, in the correct orientation, taking full advantage of the opportunity provided by a dual monitor set-up.

QUESTION 4: If this is technically possible to code, is this idea something you could contemplate in a future version of gPhotoShow?? If not, I really hope you can at least allow for each monitor to have an independent display time, which would go some way to addressing the problem of imbalance in numbers between portrait and landscape images.
This is rather tricky because gPhotoShow doesn't know in advance how many pictures will be displayed on a given monitor. gPhotoShow scans all folder (and scan could be completed while it is displaying images) but the filters removes images when they are picked up to be displayed. In addition the background file synchronization could discover new images.
The only thing I can realistically think about is to allow you to configure a timing for each monitor.

Regards
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
dbk
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

Thanks for your quick feedback ... much appreciated.

First, the good news: as far as I can tell, the change you introduced in Build 917 fixes the problem with the specific images that were displaying incorrectly (portrait vs landscape). The two displays look AMAZING when all the images are filtered correctly!

However, a couple of new -- hopefully minor -- issues have cropped up. I will try to describe them accurately:

1. As mentioned previously, I have fewer portrait images than landscape. So, when running a show (of 285 slides, from a single folder), the portrait images reset from the beginning (as expected). I think it was after this happened (i.e. on the second pass of portrait images), I started to get a periodic error message on the LANDSCAPE monitor: "gPS has recovered from a serious error while loading an image file". This error was displayed (only) on the landscape monitor, a total of about 20 times during the show. If I had to guess -- but I can't be sure -- it may be associated with the loading of "Panarama" images that are displayed. But it might also have nothing to do with that. The tricky thing, for debugging, is all of the images in the show (including Panoramas) seem to display correctly... unless maybe I'm not aware of some images that are not displaying at all (I haven't checked closely, since it's a big slide show).

Obviously, the prominent error message spoils the show; but that's the only thing that seems to be causing a problem (maybe unnecessarily?). Can you look into this?

2. I use the 'Display Image Number' to keep track of which images are loading. I notice that, at the beginning of the above-mentioned slide show, some of the numbers of images showing on the portrait & landscape monitors are DUPLICATED (identical): i.e. same image number appears on two images while they being are displayed, simultaneously. After a short while, the parallel numbering on the two monitors "diverges" and the problem seems to go away.

It's really not a big deal and doesn't affect the screening of the images, but you might want to check what might be going on.

* * *

Re - independent timing of monitors: Could you possibly introduce this over the coming weeks/months?? That would really be great, in terms of creating a more balanced display of portrait & landscape images.

* * *

Sequential slide show: I think I understand your explanation of how gPS works (and what makes this difficult to implement), but maybe the following clarification will simplify my request and make it 'doable':

I don't need an "open-ended" sequential show, pulling images from multiple folders. Rather, I only want to display a FINITE number of pre-selected images, from a SINGLE folder (i.e. probably never more than 200-300 images in total). So, I would think that the information on "exactly how many images, and what needs to be displayed where" could be captured in the initial scan (i.e. in advance of anything being displayed)? Then, it's only a question of giving an instruction to display the (known) images in the correct sequence, and coordinating this process between the two monitors (the tricky bit). I realise that this might require a special "stand-alone" operation, perhaps different from the way gPS normally processes its images.

With that clarification/simplification, would it be feasible to introduce this feature over the coming year?

In any case, thanks again for producing a very nice application that offers what I've been looking for.
dbk
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Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2017 4:35 am

Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

I'm not sure if my second post today submitted properly. If yes, ignore this message. Otherwise, I wrote to say the error message I was getting (not a bug) arose from a missing "Additional file extension". (My folder contained a bmp file that could not load. Once I added the bmp extension, the error message disappeared. I suggest modifying the error message to read: "gPhotoShow/Screensaver image could not load (unidentified file extension)"

The other issues/suggestions remain valid.

Very nice application!!
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gpb
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by gpb »

dbk wrote: 1. As mentioned previously, I have fewer portrait images than landscape. So, when running a show (of 285 slides, from a single folder), the portrait images reset from the beginning (as expected). I think it was after this happened (i.e. on the second pass of portrait images), I started to get a periodic error message on the LANDSCAPE monitor: "gPS has recovered from a serious error while loading an image file". This error was displayed (only) on the landscape monitor, a total of about 20 times during the show. If I had to guess -- but I can't be sure -- it may be associated with the loading of "Panarama" images that are displayed. But it might also have nothing to do with that. The tricky thing, for debugging, is all of the images in the show (including Panoramas) seem to display correctly... unless maybe I'm not aware of some images that are not displaying at all (I haven't checked closely, since it's a big slide show).

Obviously, the prominent error message spoils the show; but that's the only thing that seems to be causing a problem (maybe unnecessarily?). Can you look into this?
That message is displayed when the library function used to load images crashes, was this caused bmp file you wrote about in the next message ? If yes, file types specified in additional file extensions are loaded using a different library, this may explain the reason the error is fixed. Normally additional file extensions is used to display raw files from digital cameras.
dbk wrote:
2. I use the 'Display Image Number' to keep track of which images are loading. I notice that, at the beginning of the above-mentioned slide show, some of the numbers of images showing on the portrait & landscape monitors are DUPLICATED (identical): i.e. same image number appears on two images while they being are displayed, simultaneously. After a short while, the parallel numbering on the two monitors "diverges" and the problem seems to go away.

It's really not a big deal and doesn't affect the screening of the images, but you might want to check what might be going on.
gPhotoShow keeps an images list for each monitor, at the beginning they contain all files, but after some work files are filtered out so the number of files become different and "image number" is of course different. At the moment there is nothing I can do to fix this issue. I should filter images before starting to display them but this not something I am going to do because it has several drawbacks, in particular if there a huge number of files it would slow down slideshow startup.
dbk wrote: Re - independent timing of monitors: Could you possibly introduce this over the coming weeks/months?? That would really be great, in terms of creating a more balanced display of portrait & landscape images.
I should be able to add it in gPhotoShow V8 which should be released within 2 or 3 months.
dbk wrote: Sequential slide show: I think I understand your explanation of how gPS works (and what makes this difficult to implement), but maybe the following clarification will simplify my request and make it 'doable':

I don't need an "open-ended" sequential show, pulling images from multiple folders. Rather, I only want to display a FINITE number of pre-selected images, from a SINGLE folder (i.e. probably never more than 200-300 images in total). So, I would think that the information on "exactly how many images, and what needs to be displayed where" could be captured in the initial scan (i.e. in advance of anything being displayed)? Then, it's only a question of giving an instruction to display the (known) images in the correct sequence, and coordinating this process between the two monitors (the tricky bit). I realise that this might require a special "stand-alone" operation, perhaps different from the way gPS normally processes its images.

With that clarification/simplification, would it be feasible to introduce this feature over the coming year?
I understand you have simpler requirements but gPhotoShow is a generic program and must work for user with few images and other with a huge image collection (some users have more that 1 million of images and hit the 2Gb memory limit of gPhotoShow), at the moment I am not sure I wish to implement specific code for users that have a small number of images.
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
dbk
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

Thanks, as always, for your feedback.

Specifying the bmp extension appears to have resolved most of the issues in the couple of folders I've been using so far for test purposes.

Some of the issues that still remain seem to be related to loading of panoramic images. Sometimes they don't load (causing an error message), sometimes a landscape panorama loads on the portrait monitor (and vice-versa), and other times these same images load perfectly. (Also, I notice that there's sometimes a 'ghost image' effect, but this seems to be manageable by extending the delay/transition speeds.)

I find that a couple of errors is not such a big deal in a slide show of 300; which raises a new point:

1. Is there a setting (tickbox) where a user can opt to toggle on/off the error message display? I find that an image that doesn't load is not very noticeable, if at all, compared to the prominent error message that pops up for everyone to see. Possible to introduce in Version 8?

2. Coming back to panoramic images: The scrolling feature is fantastic, but for some images that are only "mildly panoramic" I would like to avoid them being detected as panoramas. I wanted to do this by changing the aspect ratio to say, 2.5, but the setting box seems to accept only integers (even though it shows two decimal places). Setting of 3.0 fails to detect many images that really are panoramas.

Am I doing something wrong, or can this setting be altered to allow decimals?

3. I agree with you that the 'Display Issue Number' is not important. More interesting is the display of file name. In this regard, would it be possible to display (optionally) the whole FILE PATH on the screen, to make it easier to identify the source of a particular image? This would be especially useful in a random show.

4. I haven't quite figured out, in the 'IMAGES' module, how the recursive search is supposed to work. If I add a top level directory, gPS seems not to search in the subdirectories of that folder unless I explicitly add them all with the AddSubDir routine. That's straight forward for the first level of say, 20 subdirectories, but adding all of the sub-directories of those becomes tedious. I'm sure I'm just not understanding how this is supposed to work. I would have assumed that simply entering the top level directory and telling it to stop at level 5 would capture all the images in five levels of sub-directories? Sorry if I'm missing something very obvious here. ;-)

5. Now that I've discovered the error log, I will try to explore the source of the many "LoadNewBitmap: SEH Exception c0000005, maybe the file loaded is corrupted or in unsupported format" errors that I'm finding in my wider collection of jpg files. Some of the images are quite old, so perhaps the EXIF tagging is messed up?

6. Coming back to my request to be able to display landscape/portrait images sequentially. I understand your point about users having different needs. As I read some of the forum, I'm amazed at what some people are doing with gPS. The software must be extremely robust to be handle these high volumes/specialised demands.

As I mentioned in my very first post, gPhotoShow is great for displaying random images in landscape/portrait mode. On the other hand, I would have thought that a sequential landscape/portrait slide show player would be highly sought after by the 'average' user -- where this facility doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. Adding this functionality could help to 'mainstream'/ promote gPhotoShow to a much wider audience who might have less specialised/demanding needs.

By way of example: the other day I wanted to display a beautiful 300+ image slideshow with a sequential narrative, but the out-of-sequence images on the portrait monitor were so distracting to the viewer that I opted to go back to my single landscape monitor to display both the landscape and portrait images. In the trade-off between sequential narrative vs. optimal display, the former wins out in my case. So, I'm more or less back to square one in my search for this facility. I really hope you'll reconsider this at some point, if you appreciate what I'm getting at.

PS: I love the PhotoWall!! (Great for helping to choose among images to display.) More useful features still to be discovered, I'm sure ...
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gpb
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by gpb »

dbk wrote: I find that a couple of errors is not such a big deal in a slide show of 300; which raises a new point:

1. Is there a setting (tickbox) where a user can opt to toggle on/off the error message display? I find that an image that doesn't load is not very noticeable, if at all, compared to the prominent error message that pops up for everyone to see. Possible to introduce in Version 8?
That error message is caused by the code I added in the last update, I didn't test it carefully so on some images it crashes. Tomorrow I will provide you an update.
dbk wrote: 2. Coming back to panoramic images: The scrolling feature is fantastic, but for some images that are only "mildly panoramic" I would like to avoid them being detected as panoramas. I wanted to do this by changing the aspect ratio to say, 2.5, but the setting box seems to accept only integers (even though it shows two decimal places). Setting of 3.0 fails to detect many images that really are panoramas.

Am I doing something wrong, or can this setting be altered to allow decimals?
Text boxes of aspect ratio accept decimal numbers, default is 2.00 if I write 2.5 and change page going back I see 2.50, if I save and reload setting I always see 2.50. What does it happen there ? When decimals are lost ?
dbk wrote: 3. I agree with you that the 'Display Issue Number' is not important. More interesting is the display of file name. In this regard, would it be possible to display (optionally) the whole FILE PATH on the screen, to make it easier to identify the source of a particular image? This would be especially useful in a random show.
Yes, of course, gPhotoShow not only is able to display image file name but also most exif/iptc/xmp tags. Go to Images->Information page, with simple setting you can choose main information in a simple way, with advanced you can compose a text containing tags from images.
dbk wrote: 4. I haven't quite figured out, in the 'IMAGES' module, how the recursive search is supposed to work. If I add a top level directory, gPS seems not to search in the subdirectories of that folder unless I explicitly add them all with the AddSubDir routine. That's straight forward for the first level of say, 20 subdirectories, but adding all of the sub-directories of those becomes tedious. I'm sure I'm just not understanding how this is supposed to work. I would have assumed that simply entering the top level directory and telling it to stop at level 5 would capture all the images in five levels of sub-directories? Sorry if I'm missing something very obvious here. ;-)
It works exactly in that way, add just the root folder and gPhotoShow will scan all subfolders until the preset level. First try to set level=0, the click on the button "View files" it will display all images found by gPhotoShow, then if needed modify level.
dbk wrote: 5. Now that I've discovered the error log, I will try to explore the source of the many "LoadNewBitmap: SEH Exception c0000005, maybe the file loaded is corrupted or in unsupported format" errors that I'm finding in my wider collection of jpg files. Some of the images are quite old, so perhaps the EXIF tagging is messed up?
The error is caused by the code I added in the last update, it crashes if the exif orientation tag is not present.
dbk wrote: 6. Coming back to my request to be able to display landscape/portrait images sequentially. I understand your point about users having different needs. As I read some of the forum, I'm amazed at what some people are doing with gPS. The software must be extremely robust to be handle these high volumes/specialised demands.

As I mentioned in my very first post, gPhotoShow is great for displaying random images in landscape/portrait mode. On the other hand, I would have thought that a sequential landscape/portrait slide show player would be highly sought after by the 'average' user -- where this facility doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. Adding this functionality could help to 'mainstream'/ promote gPhotoShow to a much wider audience who might have less specialised/demanding needs.
...
I started to work on gPhotoShow many years ago when I was not able to find a good screen saver to display my own photos, so basically gPhotoShow is aimed to photographers or anybody who has a huge collection of images and simply want to display when not using the computer. For this reason gPhotoShow is able to handle a huge number of images and has lot of options to select, filter and give priority to some categories. For example I have 40k images in my collection, I filter out all portrait images (I only a have landscape monitors) and give priority to images taken during last month and with higher rating.
This doesn't mean it can't be used for sequential display, some customers use the program to display slides and video in public places, some of them on single monitor, others on walls with 9 or 12 monitors
What is really lacking in gPhotoShow is synchronization between images on different monitor or between images and audio, but gPhotoShow was not designed for this kind of slideshow so probably it will never have this kind of feature.
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
dbk
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

1. Looking forward to update. It would still be nice to have the option to toggle the error messages on/off, if that's possible.

2. Panorama settings: something strange still going on. In gPhotoShow settings, the error message I get every time I try to replace an integer with a decimal is: "Unacceptable Character, you can only type a number here". Today, I tried instead to configure ScreenSaver, and it did indeed accept alternate decimal values (e.g. 2.3, 2.5) -- just as you said it should. When I went back into gPhotoShow to try to replicate this success, I got the same error message as before. Finally, when I went back into ScreenSaver config, I found that the stored value had changed (from 2.3 to "2.29", which I certainly had not entered) and I was again not able to make any further changes: the same "Unacceptable Character" message was generated in ScreenSaver too. After fiddling with this a bit more, the application crashed completely (for the very first time).

3.Thanks, I found the setting for full file path etc (under Advanced, Header, File Info) - very nice.

4. OK on the root folder display. If I understand correctly, the place to tell it NOT to display one or more sub-directories, is NOT in the "Images" module, but rather in the "Global Exclusions" module (i.e. text, separated by commas), right?

5. OK on the tricky synchronisation issue. I'm sure if/when you will have a second portrait monitor you'll warm to idea, so I haven't given up completely ;-) (By the way, I'm delighted with the Dell U2515H that I recently purchased for landscapes. I now use my old U2417H for portraits.) Anyhow, independent monitor timing in v.8 will be an improvement.
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gpb
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by gpb »

dbk wrote:1. Looking forward to update. It would still be nice to have the option to toggle the error messages on/off, if that's possible.

2. Panorama settings: something strange still going on. In gPhotoShow settings, the error message I get every time I try to replace an integer with a decimal is: "Unacceptable Character, you can only type a number here". Today, I tried instead to configure ScreenSaver, and it did indeed accept alternate decimal values (e.g. 2.3, 2.5) -- just as you said it should. When I went back into gPhotoShow to try to replicate this success, I got the same error message as before. Finally, when I went back into ScreenSaver config, I found that the stored value had changed (from 2.3 to "2.29", which I certainly had not entered) and I was again not able to make any further changes: the same "Unacceptable Character" message was generated in ScreenSaver too. After fiddling with this a bit more, the application crashed completely (for the very first time).
This updated version fixes both issues:
http://www.gphotoshow.com/files/gpsprosetup-918.exe

The error popup can be disabled in "File Options" -> "Display popup message...."
dbk wrote: 4. OK on the root folder display. If I understand correctly, the place to tell it NOT to display one or more sub-directories, is NOT in the "Images" module, but rather in the "Global Exclusions" module (i.e. text, separated by commas), right?
"Global Exclusions" settings can be used to remove file names after gPhotoShow completed directory scan, it can be used to remove thumbnails or subfolders, for example I use it to remove source images of panoramic and HDR images by excluding subfolders "*\\hdr-src\\*;*\\pano\\*"
dbk wrote: 5. OK on the tricky synchronisation issue. I'm sure if/when you will have a second portrait monitor you'll warm to idea, so I haven't given up completely ;-) (By the way, I'm delighted with the Dell U2515H that I recently purchased for landscapes. I now use my old U2417H for portraits.) Anyhow, independent monitor timing in v.8 will be an improvement.
I will see what I can do on version 8 :)
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
dbk
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Re: Sequential slideshow on dual (landscape/portrait) monitors

Post by dbk »

Build 918 seems to be working perfectly ... no error messages being generated now. Many thanks! :D
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