A while back, after I got my insignia android tablet I bought a
Chromecast Ultra to display the photos from my tablet on my cheap 4k
monitor. Long story short, that was a big failure but I was able to use
their ambient mode, log into my flickr account and display albums from
my flickr account as "screen saver" on the TV. At some point either
Yahoo or Chrome broke things and I can no longer log into my flickr
account from google home.
The problems with the software on this PoS are legion. With the caveat
that I don't know how bad any of the competitor systems are, I can't
recommend buying a chromecast, just because of the massive suckage in
the UI. On the plus side, there are a few things that it does a passable
job of, such as watching netflix and displaying stuff from a browser on
the TV screen.
Last night, I was able to get it to display select albums from google
photo. It still has the major flaw of taking a photo, magnifying it to
fill, rather than shrinking it to fit, which completely messes up the
composition of any photo that wasn't processed to a 2190x1080
(3840x2160) aspect ratio.
It turns out that if I process my files in the lightroom print module,
to that aspect ratio, I can set it up to fill the background with black.
If I then upload the photos through the google photos interface, at
under 16MP resolution ( no real need to go beyond 8M with a 4k screen),
they are kept on google photos with no storage limit. Of course, there
is no way, that I can figure out, of getting lightroom to generate files
this way from a set of files that preserves the original filenames, but
that is a rant for another day.
So, the bright side is that I can now set up a random slideshow of my
photos to show on my "TV" during Whiskymas tomorrow. It's an awkward
pain in the ass, but after a fashion it works, and if anyone else has a
chromecast and wants to show their photos, it's one way to do so.
--
Larry Colen l...@red4est.com http://red4est.com/lrc
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157612824732477/
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