Display Google Albums

[grant66]

I mounted a google shared album using rclone into the pictures folder which picframe displayed correctly.
When a new picture is added to the album the file count doesn't change & the new file isn't displayed.
I can see the file is added nearly instantly if I check the folder on the Pi.
Hitting the shuffle button & changing directories doesn't make the new file available.

Stopping picframe & restarting then gave the correct file count & the new file is displayed.

Is there a way to force the db rebuild without having to restart?
Interestingly I have other mounted folders (e.g. HA camera files) that update correctly, it's only the google albums that don't.

[jgodfrey]

So, you're just using rclone to sync the Google album to a sub-folder in the frame's Pictures folder? Specifically, it's just a copy of the Google album photo's, right? In that case, I'm not sure why the "shuffle toggle" trick doesn't work. That's what I do here when I've updated images on the frame that I want to see immediately.

I wonder if rclone is updating the folder in a way that's not seen by the underlying Python code. Hmmm...

[grant66]

Thanks for the quick reply.

That's a better description than mine :) Yes it's a folder mounted under the 'Pictures' folder. It's a clone of the Google album, so I can delete from HA, which works correctly (it even puts them in the 'deleted' folder).

"Shuffle toggle" works for everything else even the other NAS mounted folders.

I can't see anything relevant on the rclone help pages :(

[jgodfrey]

I just experimented with this here, and while it DOES work as expected (at least for me), it's somewhat confusing. Here's what I did, so you can compare / contrast it to your workflow...

• Added a new image to a rclone sync'd google album
• Triggered a sync via: rclone sync <google_album> <local_folder> (I don't have this as a scheduled job)
• Verified that the new photo was indeed in locally sync'd folder (yep)
• Went to the frame and did a "shuffle off / shuffle on" from my remote to rebuild the current slideshow playlist

Here, I was expecting to immediately see my new photo, but that wasn't the case. This was my first point of confusion.

My frame is configured to show images added in the past 24 hours at the beginning of the show. I expected my new image to be in that bucket, but for some reason, it was not...

• Next, I looked at the database to see if the new file had actually been ingested. And, sure enough, the new file had a a record in the file table, just as it should. So, why wasn't it considered "new" and shown at the beginning of the slideshow? My second point of confusion...

• Digging deeper, I noted that rclone maintained the original date/time stamp on the image, which in my case was from the middle of 2021. So, the image wasn't actually new, and therefore did not meet the "last 24 hours" criteria mentioned above. In hindsight, maintaining the original date/time stamp makes perfect sense for a sync app. That said, there could be a way to configure rclone to update the timestamp on sync - I'm not sure (I know there's an rclone touch command that could be helpful here).

• At this point, the image had been ingested and had been added to the current playlist (via the shuffle toggle trick). So, it was in the playlist, but since it wasn't forced to the beginning, it could be many hours before it was shown (my slideshow runs about 8'ish hours).

Looking over your original post, I see that you mentioned your image count didn't account for the new image after the shuffle toggle. That's something I hadn't looked at originally so I did the following:

• Noted the current count
• Added another image to my sync'd google album
• Ran the rclone sync command again
• Saw the image immediately added to the db
• Did the sync toggle on my remote
• Noted that the image count increased by 1, as expected.

So, the whole thing, including the image counter seems to work as expected here (ignoring the points of confusion mentioned above).

How are you accessing the image count? In my case, I'm using the homeassistant/sensor/picframe/state topic and pulling the image_counter property from the JSON. Maybe you're accessing it some other way that's not properly updated on image count change?

[grant66]

Thanks for the in-depth investigation.

I'm using the sensor.picframe_image_counter entity, which seems to have been the cause of the problem. The state attribute has the right number.

Didn't think it could be the issue as it was updating the other folders correctly.

It not showing up as the 1st image and the counter not changing made me believe it wasn't in the dB. Scrolling through the pictures found it.

Problem fixed by removing the picframe mqtt integration and reinstalling. It's now updating the count correctly.

I don't understand why it should only affect one folder and not the others I tried, need to do some more reading as to how these entities are produced.