misterhaan/reminisce

Photo slideshow skin for Rainmeter

Reminisce

Reminisce is a photo slideshow skin for Rainmeter. It randomly shows a photo from your pictures folder and its subfolders, can launch that photo in the default photo viewing application, and can go back to the previous photo in case you wanted to launch that one but missed it.

The following settings can be configured by editing the ini file (right-click on the skin and choose edit skin from the menu). Find them in the [Variables] section:

PhotosPath

Set to the base directory containing photos. Default is your windows Pictures folder.

ChangeSeconds

How long to display a photo before moving on to the next random photo. Default is 180 (3 minutes).

SizeW and SizeH

Width and height in pixels of the photo part of the skin. Use to make the skin larger or smaller. It's best to set them to the aspect ratio of most of your photos (commonly 4:3 or 16:9). Default 200 × 150 (4:3 aspect ratio).

BorderSize

Width of the border around photos in pixels. Default 4.

BorderColor

Color of the border around photos. Default is white with 80% opacity (ffffffcc).

BackColor

Color of the background space between photos and the border (only visible for photos that do not match the aspect ratio). Default is black with 47% opacity (00000077).

Revision History

1.0

• Initial release.

External Libraries

Reminisce includes icons from Material Design.

reminisce's Issues

Hide or deactivate PrevButton when there is no previous photo

The previous photo button only lets you go back one photo, which is fine when there is a previous photo. When the skin first loads, there is no previous photo. Also between clicking the prev button and the next photo loading, the prev button will actually reload the same photo.

I’m not sure if Rainmeter can do this, but ideally when the PreviousPhoto variable is blank the prev button would be hidden or visibly inactive. That variable would also need to be cleared after clicking the prev button so that the prev button gets disabled after it’s used until a new random photo gets chosen.

Make subdirectories setting a variable

I figured everyone would want to include subdirectories, but someone left a comment saying they wanted to change the setting. To make that easier I should put it in the variables section, which makes it related to #3 and #4.

No previous / next buttons when launching photo in Windows 10 Photos app

On Windows 10 if your default application for photos is the Photos app, it launches from Reminisce and shows the photo just fine, but it doesn’t include the previous and next arrows on the left and right sides that you would have if you double-clicked the exact same photo file in Windows Explorer. This appears to be a bug with the Photos app that Reminisce might not be able to do anything about.

Configuration GUI

Rather than make people edit a section of the Reminisce.ini file to change settings, it would be easier if there was a configuration form to edit those settings on their own. It would help to do this together with issue #3 because there’s otherwise no direct way to edit the file with the settings variables.

Persist configuration variables when a skin upgrade is applied

Rainmeter lets you specify a variables file that shouldn’t be replaced when the skin gets upgraded. Reminisce should use that to keep the PhotosPath, ChangeSeconds, SizeW, and SizeH settings at minimum, and probably BorderSize, BorderColor, and BackColor as well.

Add header image for the rmskin package

It might be a nice touch to create a header image for the rmskin package which should show when installing from the package. According to the Rainmeter documentation, the image must be a bitmap image (.bmp) that is exactly 400x60 pixels.