Celebrate birthdays and anniversaries with auto-themed photos on your digital frame

One of our readers, Meir, recently suggested a new Pi3D Picture Frame feature on the GitHub forum.

He wanted an automatic filter on specific dates, like birthdays or anniversaries. On these special days, only a hand-made collection of images would be shown without manual interaction.

Never forget another wedding anniversary when you only see photos of your wedding in the morning. Talk about a gentle reminder!

My first thought was that this was going to be challenging.

But it turns out that with some first principles thinking from Paddy, it’s very easy to implement.

Meir and Paddy devised a super simple solution, which they were kind enough to let me share here.

Here is how it works.

PictureFrame lets you remote control the display via HTTP, MQTT, or SSH.

Using HTTP, you can send a filter to use only a certain directory.

Then, you let crontab check at 0:01 a.m. every day to see if a set date is met. If yes, you send an HTTP command to your frame.

There are three steps:

Prepare your picture collection

Ask yourself the question:

A. Do you want to show photos on these special days, that you wouldn’t show normally? Think greetings cards, a personal message.

B. Or do you want to focus on a set of images to be shown exclusively on a particular day?

A. Show special photos that you don’t normally display

If A is your answer, create a new directory in “Pictures” called “main” and put all the pictures displayed each day in it. Do not leave pictures in the “Pictures” directory.

Then create the special dates subdirectories in the form MMDD (MM for the month and DD for the day (e.g., “0510” for the tenth of May) in the “Pictures” directory.

Move all the photos that you want to show on these dates. If you also want to include them in your normal collection, copy them instead of moving them so there is a picture in both “main” and your special days.

Also, change the default picture directory in configuration.yaml to “Pictures/main” like this

  pic_dir: "/home/pi/Pictures/main"                   # default="/home/pi/Pictures", root folder for images

B. Focus on a set of images exclusively

In this scenario, you merely filter on special photos that are part of your normal collection anyway. You just show only those photos on that day.

In that case, you don’t have to create a “main” directory or change anything in the configuration.yaml.

Just create your subdirectories with the dates you want to make special and move your pictures in there. The format for the subdirectories is the same as above, MMDD (MM for the month and DD for the day (e.g., “0510” for the tenth of May).

Preparing PictureFrame

To activate the HTTP control of your frame, open configuration.yaml and check the following section. The default setting are this:

http:
  use_http: False                         # default=False
  path: "/home/pi/picframe_data/html"     # path to html files
  port: 9000                              # port used to serve pages by http server
  auth: false                             # default=False
  username: admin                         # username for basic auth
  password: null                          # password for basic auth
  use_ssl: False
  keyfile: "path/to/key.pem"              # private-key
  certfile: "path/to/cert.pem"            # server certificate

Unless you have some special security settings, you just need to activate HTTP with

http:
  use_http: True                         # default=False

Leave all other values unchanged. Save and close.

Create the Python script

Log onto your Raspberry Pi.

Go to the picframe_data directory with

cd /home/pi/picframe_data

and create a new Python script with

sudo nano check_date.py

Paste the below content in this file.

#!/usr/bin/python3

import datetime
import os
from urllib import request

ROOT_DIR = "/home/pi/Pictures"  # Root directory for picture subdirectories
URL = "http://localhost:9000"    # URL for sending requests

# Get current date and format it as MMDD
date_now = datetime.datetime.now()
subdirectory = f"{date_now.month:02}{date_now.day:02}"
full_url = f"{URL}?subdirectory="

# Check if the subdirectory exists within the root directory
if subdirectory in os.listdir(ROOT_DIR):  # No error handling here
    full_url += subdirectory  # Append the subdirectory to the URL
    request.urlopen(full_url)  # Send a request to the constructed URL

# Log the URL with date and time for debugging purposes
with open("/home/pi/picframe_data/check_date_log.txt", "a") as log_file:
    log_file.write(f"{datetime.datetime.now()} - directory:{full_url}\n")

Save and close.

Make executable with

chmod +x /home/pi/picframe_data/check_date.py

Make the crontab settings

Now, all you need to do is instruct crontab

Type

crontab -e

and make the script run each day at zero 0 one by adding these two lines

@reboot sleep 60 && python3 /home/pi/picframe_data/check_date.py
01 00 * * * python3 /home/pi/picframe_data/check_date.py

I added the reboot command line with a short sleep delay so that you can test it with the current day. The sleep delay is necessary because sometimes, @reboot jobs run before all system services have fully initialized. If you use a slow Raspberry Pi, you may have to extend the sleep time. 30 seconds seem to be fine on a Pi 5.

You may even want to change the time to more like four o’clock in the morning, so if you have a birthday party in the evening, your frame will not kill the mood by changing back to your general “Pictures” directory while everybody is still dancing.

In that case, enter

00 04 * * * python3 /home/pi/picframe_data/check_date.py

Alternative approach

Instead of using directories, you could alternatively include a tag (“0510” for May 10) in your special occasion photos and filter on the tag. That way, you won’t need to put them in different subdirectories.

However, I would assume that most people are unfamiliar with tagging, so Meir’s solution is much easier to implement.

Conclusion

Thank you to Meir for coming up with such an exciting feature idea and to Paddy for helping him devise a simple solution.

Don’t ever forget your wedding day again with this simple feature!

Thank you for your support and motivation.