In the picture framing industry, a mat (or mount in British English) is a thin, flat piece of paper-based material included within a picture frame, which serves as additional decoration and to perform several other, more practical functions, such as separating the art from the glass. — Wikipedia

Mat is a software suite designed to run digital picture frames.

Note: Mat is currently just a prototype, so don't expect everything to work just yet.

Mat runs in two parts, a client and a server.

The server handles finding image sources (through configuration), and controls which image is shown.

The client is basically a small HTML/Javascript page that receives instructions from the server.

Simply build and run Mat (using Visual Studio 2010 or above), and with the default configuration it will serve the images from your Sample pictures folder. You can easily modify the configuration to add pictures from other folders.

Mat is configured through Web.config, under <mat>. It is by default set up to pull images from the Flickr Best 100 pool.

Mat supports multiple data sources.

The local image data source (the <local /> tag in the configuration) monitors a single folder on your machine, and displays all the images in that folder.

If an image is added when the server is already running, it will be picked up and displayed next.

<mat>
  <sources>
    <local path="C:\Users\Vegard\Pictures" />
  </sources>
</mat>

The static source allows you to link directly to individual images on an external server. You can add as many images as you like, but the URLs have to be encoded in the Web.config file, and to add more images you have to restart the server.

<mat>
  <sources>
    <static>
      <source path="http://example.com/pictureA.jpg" />
      <source path="http://example.com/pictureB.jpg" />
    </static>
  </sources>
</mat>

Using Dropbox as a source is practical, as you can update your picture frame from anywhere. The Dropbox source is complex to configure, and it is easiest to use the configurator application, as you will need API credentials for using Dropbox.

The Dropbox source can either run in a Dropbox app folder (which is a separate folder that only the app and you have access to), or through a path of your entire Dropbox (requires more privileges but allows accessing shared folders).

You can also have it get images directly from your Dropbox, or let the images be downloaded locally first.

You should probably use the configurator tool to configure this, but the XML syntax is here (default values are used):

<mat>
  <sources>
    <dropbox 
       key="foo" 
       secret="bar" 
       userToken="baz" 
       userSecret="quz" 
       sandbox="true"
       path="/"
       recursive="true"
       local="false" />
  </sources>
</mat>

Uses a Flickr feed URL (Atom format is the only we support) to get images. As the feed only contains one set of images (1024 pixels wide), the image quality may not be good enough.

<mat>
  <sources>
    <flickr href="http://ycpi.api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=80641914@N00" />
  </sources>
</mat>

These are ideas on sources I want to add, but haven't gotten around to:

• Flickr API - Use the Flickr API to get images from a a certain group or user.
• Remote - Allow a remote computer (running a separate program) to upload images to the server (think of it as a "remote local folder").

• Security Currently the service is completely open, meaning all images are available to anyone.
• Configurability Configure things like time per image, ordering, and so on.
• Remote control Let you skip an image, pause on an image, and so on.