That phrase makes me giggle, but it's a very good lesson. The other day I had posted about having a hard time deciding on how to start solving a problem because I was aiming for perfect. Talking this over coffee with Andrew, he asked if I was trying to solve the problem, or was I trying to learn something new. If it was solving the problem, go with the tools that I was most familiar with and get it done. Otherwise I could go with the whole "learn new stuff and take 10x as long" path.
It's good to figure out what the actual goals of any project are. After thinking about it for a while, I figured out that it was actually solving the problem, even if my solution didn't benefit anyone else.
So I hacked some code out that did 2 things. The first code for migrating our existing pictures in flickr or a set that I created. That way I had a "status quo" set of pictures to put on the frame. The second chunk of code pulls all pictures from the "picture frame set" on flickr to the local drive (as a cache), sorts them by vertical vs horizontal, and removes any files from the cache that have been removed from the set. Then I just rsync the files to the SD card to put into the frame.
One benefit of this that I had not thought of when I started was that I don't actually need the original sized images. The "large" size on flickr is more than large enough. The file size dropped by at least an order of magnitude, so we can fit so many more images on the same card. It even works better in the frame - the pictures load faster. It seems snappier.
While it's great to provide a nice tool for others to use, most likely that altruistic thinking will be enough to prevent me from actually getting the project in a "works right now" state. Better to have a finished hack than project ideas sitting on the shelf.
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