SharePoint (sort of) Photo Album with Slideshow
I was doing some work for another client this week and they wanted a Slideshow in SharePoint that would rotate through a set of pictures. SharePoint has a web part that will allow you to display a picture on a site and you can start it as a slideshow, however, it won’t automatically loop through a set of pictures. To solve their problem I used this application create in SilverLight. I know, it’s another browser pluggin to install. But it really is a cool Microsoft Project and can do some very cool stuff. I liked the application so much, I installed it on my blog, you can see my photo albums here. It isn’t a true SharePoint web part as it just using JavaScript and SilverLight. To use it in SharePoint, all you need to do is upload all the configuration files into a document library and then put a content view web part on the site you want your photo album on and point it to the html file in your document library. You can put the photos in another library and point your Data.XML file to the picture in the document library. It works for now. My next project when I get more time is going to work with a co-worker to add to the code so that a Picture Library in SharePoint can be used as the data source for the Photo Album so you can eliminate the Data.XML file when using the application with SharePoint.
Hi.
I was trying to make a webpart for the same which u have developed here.
But i m not able to get the output in my Sharepoint site.
Can u give me steps for creating it with the code sample.
Reply me on my email address ASAP
Hi
Can you tell me the steps of doing your slideshow in the sharepoint.
waiting for your reply
Here are the steps to use the Silverlight Photo Album in SharePoint:
1. Create a new document library
2. Upload Silverlight.js and Slideshow.js from the Slide.Show\Scripts\Release folder
3. Create an HTML file similar to this (right click and chose Save Target As…)
4. Upload the HTML File to the same folder
5. Upload the Configuration.xml and Data.xml. A sample of the files can be found in Slide.Show\Samples\Typical
6. Edit Configuration.xml and Data.xml based on how you want your photo album to display.
7. Add a page viewer webpart to the page you want the photo gallery on and point it to the HTML page in your document library.
This should show the photo album in that webpart.
Where do you upload the .js files and the .html file to on the sharepoint server?
You can put all the files in the same document library in SharePoint. If you don’t want to do that, you can always use SharePoint Designer to upload the files to the site root. You’ll just need to make sure you modify all the files to point to the correct location of the various files.
Thanks so much for your help.
Thank you so much …. i will try the steps right now
Hi,
I am attempting to use your method to put a slideshow on my sharepoint site. I am not able to get the HTML code you used. Can you please help me out? Thanks
This is the excellent post….
i tried to put the photos in the slide library and tried to use your way but its not working…
where to provide the slide library path? so that it will pik up all photos from there…
Kapildev,
You can’t actually provide a path for the slide show and have it automatically pick up all the pictures. This was a project I wanted to do, and like so many others, just haven’t gotten around to it. Currently, you just need to hard code the path to each pictures in the data.xml file.
You can have the pictures in multiple locations and but in the various locations, or have them all in the same location and put in the location of every picture. Either way, you still need to type in the path for every image you want to display in the data.xml file.
Hi
the viewer is great just i am only using one album so how do you make it open in slide view first rather than album view?
This is really cool!. Thanks for sharing. I was able to configure and make it work in my SharePoint site
This is an excellent post!
I’d tried it in my SharePoint site and it works.
Mike,
It is set in the Configuration.xml file. You probably have something in that file similar to:
module type=”NavigationTray”
option name=”initialAlbumView” value=”true”
option name=”thumbnailViewer.left” value=”83″
module
(I had to leave off the XML brackets as my comments won’t allow code in them, but you get the idea)
If you remove the option name=”initialAlbumView” value=”true” from the Configuration.xml file the first album (or in your case only album) will start in the slideshow mode.
Your photo album crashed my Safari browser
Interesting, I just tested the photo album I have running on my site using Safari on a Mac and it worked fine for me. Were you running Safari on a Windows box and did you access the photo album on my site or on another SharePoint site? I’ll do some testing and see if I can figure out if there is something in the photo album causing it to crash.
Yes and Yes.
I’m running Safari 3 on Windows. I tried it on two different computers.
Excuse my lack of knowledge in this area but is there any additional setup required on the SP Server to support the Silverlight engine rendering the control?
You do not need anything installed on the SharePoint server to support to support Silverlight, all you need is the Slide.Show files and Silverlight installed on the client computer(s). As far as Safari goes, I’ll have to do some testing, I’ll post an update if I can figure out the Safari crashes.
IS there a way in this slideshow view of photos to have the latest as the first displayed? at the moment the last pic is first on the thumbnail then when we click on it there is 75 photos to click next to reach that pic help????????
Very well written instructions here! I was able to create my slideshow in sharepoint. Keep it up!
Steven,
What are you using for you data provider? I’ve always used the Data.xml file. Using this, the pictures are displayed in the order they are entered into the xml file. If you want the most recent picture displayed first, always add your image to the beginning of the list of photos in the xml file rather than at the end. However, if you are using Flickr, it should take the photos in the same order they are displayed in Flickr, in which case you would need to rearrange the images in Flickr. I’m not sure if there is some configuration you can change to reverse the order the pictures are displayed. If I get a chance I’ll look into it, but my recommendation would be to flip the order of the images in your xml fie.