The Samsung Frame: Best When Scripted

Context

I’ll keep it short! I’m a hobby photographer. I take lots of pictures and, every now and then, one turns out pretty nice! I bought the Samsung Frame to display my photography on its beautiful matte screen with its real-to-life “art mode” feature.

Uploading your own images to the Samsung Frame via either the TV itself (USB import) or via the phone app is dreadful. Slow, painful, often failing, and a total disaster to do 10 times, much less 1300.

Uploading Images

Here’s the script I used to do the actual image uploading. It goes without saying that you’ll need Python installed on your machine and a virtual environment setup with the samsung-tv-ws-api dependency installed. If you don’t know what that means or how to set that up, ChatGPT can walk you through it!

Here’s the goods:

# SEE SOURCE FOR METHODS: https://github.com/NickWaterton/samsung-tv-ws-api/blob/9647fdb8556938b3369ac65f38f15108391c4267/samsungtvws/art.py

import os
import time
from samsungtvws import SamsungTVWS

IMAGE_DIRECTORY = "/Users/jon/Pictures/Lightroom Exports/Frame Exports"

# MATTE TYPES (not all matte types work for all images)
# 'none' 'modernthin' 'modern' 'modernwide' 'flexible' 'shadowbox' 'panoramic' 'triptych' 'mix' 'squares'

# MATTE COLORS
# 'black' 'neutral' 'antique' 'warm' 'polar' 'sand' 'seafoam' 'sage' 'burgandy' 'navy' 'apricot' 'byzantine' 'lavender' 'redorange' 'skyblue' 'turquoise'
# (Jon) I tend to prefer 'warm' or 'apricot'

def upload_image(image_path):
    try:
      # Connect to the TV
      tv = SamsungTVWS(host="192.168.1.100")
      art = tv.art()

      # Read the image
      with open(image_path, "rb") as f:
          image_data = f.read()

      print(f"Now Uploading {image_path}...")
      # Upload the image
      # Sending both `matte` and `portrait_matte` since the image may be landscape or portrait!
      response = art.upload(
          image_data,
          file_type="JPEG",
          matte="flexible_apricot",
          portrait_matte="flexible_apricot"
      )
      print(f"Uploaded {image_path}: {response}")
      print(f"{time.ctime()}")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error uploading {image_path}: {e}")


def upload_images_in_directory(directory):
    # List all .jpg files and sort them alphabetically (so the list on the Frame is in the same order as the list on my machine)
    files = sorted(
        [filename for filename in os.listdir(directory) if filename.lower().endswith(".jpg")]
    )

    # Loop through sorted filenames
    for filename in files:
        full_path = os.path.join(directory, filename)
        upload_image(full_path)
        # Sleep 2 seconds to let the Frame TV process the image; I found this helps a lot when uploading >25 in sequence
        time.sleep(2)

# Call the function to upload all images
upload_images_in_directory(IMAGE_DIRECTORY)

Hopefully all the comments there help make it clear what’s going on! You’ll need to replace the value of the IMAGE_DIRECTORY variable as well as the hard-coded IP address, set to 192.168.1.100 in the example code.

I do have one other script that essentially just kicks the Frame into the preferred art settings I like:

# SEE SOURCE FOR METHODS: https://github.com/NickWaterton/samsung-tv-ws-api/blob/9647fdb8556938b3369ac65f38f15108391c4267/samsungtvws/art.py

import os
from samsungtvws import SamsungTVWS

TV_IP = "192.168.1.100"

tv = SamsungTVWS(host=TV_IP)
art = tv.art()

art.set_slideshow_status(15) # shuffle is default
# This automatically kicks the TV into art mode if it's not currently

Which essentially just says “Go into Art mode, on a shuffle slideshow with 15 minute image-swap times”. It’s just a handy little utility script to run if I want to reset the Frame into the right setting for my living room and I’m already on my computer.

YMMV!

Comments? Thoughts?

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