Last spring, I took my frustration with having to use multiple apps on my phone to prepare photos for Pi3D PictureFrame to the good people at the Algonquin College Mobile App Development program.
At the time, I was using one app for cropping, another for metadata, and a third for sharing to my cloud service, which is synced to my Raspberry Pi via rclone.
I asked whether they could develop a single app that could do all three. They agreed enthusiastically, and over the following months, I worked with a team of students to make it happen—and they delivered brilliantly.
The app is called MetaPi and is now available for Android, free on the Play Store! We intend to keep the app free and ad-free if at all possible.
The app includes a built-in metadata template specifically for Pi3D PictureFrame, allowing you to edit location, caption, title, and keywords. You can also unlock access to many additional metadata tags simply by selecting a different template.
MetaPi uses your device’s native “Share” function, so you can send photos to Google Drive, email, or any other supported destination. This makes it a useful tool for many setups, or even for other digital picture frames.
Two of the graduated students will continue actively tweaking and updating the app for the foreseeable future, with an iOS version for the Apple App Store coming soon.
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