Pixette SlideShow + Webdav

 Aim

My Art Gallery picture slideshow web application works very well, allowing me to look at pictures together with their descriptions and my comments.  Occasionally, I would prefer to see an iPad slideshow of the pictures full screen, with the minimum of borders / distractions.

The pictures are held on an RPI Samba shared folder and it would be easy enough to copy them across to my iPad and view them in Apple Photo or LiveFrame which I currently use.  However it doesn't seem right to do this when I already have the photos available, both on a shared folder and available as web URLs.

For some reason I found it difficult to find an iPad app that would access pictures on a shared folder and allow me to look at them in a slideshow.

Lighttpd web server

After searching Pixette appeared to be popular app, which might allow me to view shared folders collections on "NAS".  I thought that my RPI with shared folders qualified as NAS but apparently proper NAS devices have their own system software (e.g. Synology) - to allow proper file-sharing, multiple users etc.
However Pixette does support Webdav devices and I found that my web server lighttpd can be configured for webdav. I followed a guide fom Haven200 which explains how to setup lighttpd for webdav.
Unsurprisingly you need to install a couple of lighttpd modules and configure lighttpd.conf details.
You also need to make sure you have a password file available (I used htpasswd for simplicity)

After completing these steps it is possible to see my art directory structure

Configure Pixette

It took me a little time to get webdav working but once I had a URL I simply entered the details into Pixette, indexed files and sat back to watch my slideshow

Verdict

Pixette is an excellent tool which gives a proper full-screen slide show experience.  Of course the iPad has a high quality screen so the pictures themselves look great.  Pixette is intended as a digital picture frame and it shows pictures in a random order but that isn't much of an issue.

webdav is actually intended to allow you to make updateable pages, so I could probably experiment with that idea separately.  I recall that when Tim Berners-Lee initially setup his web server he intended web pages to be writeable so webdav is truer to the original idea than most.