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Forum Discussion
Meural Canvas II: Best way to find a specific file in a Meural playlist
Hello, I have a Meural Canvas II. We have created playlists with 50 to 60 files. The files in the playlists are organized in the order that makes sense visually. The files are not in alphab...
You are way ahead of me in knowledge on coding, as well as the number of photos you have in the canvas. But then I have only had ours set up for three days :-) Kudos to you though.
One of the issues I have had is that new photo additions are added to the beginning of the playlist, and I, like you, sometimes have a sequential playlist that I want to stay in that order. I am doing one on our new puppy's growth over his first year and have had to several times "Organize" the file placing the new photos last.
May I ask how you have formatted your photos to meet the 16:9 format of the canvas?
Thanks.
Hi there!
Sorry for being slow to reply. Holiday season is upon here :).
Regarding the order of your photos, we have been able to reorder the photos within a playlist via the netgear web portal.
- We go to https://my.meural.netgear.com/
- Choose the shadowed person icon in the upper right corner.
- In the pulldown select Playlists
- You should see all of the playlists that you have defined.
- Click on the playlist of interest.
- You should now see all of the photos in the clicked playlist.
- In the upper right there should be the word "Manage"
- Click "Manage" and you should be taken to a panel that allows you to rearrange your photos.
As for getting our photos into the 16:9 format, there are a couple of approaches you can consider. We are far from experts so there are probably other better techniques.
For photos taken from smart phones, our Samsungs let us specify the aspect ratio, which is what the 16:9 is, in the camera app. We have Samsung 9 and 10.
For photos taken with regular cameras, some cameras may have a place to choose the 16:9 format. Our digital cameras do not.
Once a photo has been taken, it can be cropped, reshaped, etc. using photo editting software. Our Samsung phone's default photo managing software works for that. For photos on our Windows laptop, I would expect that most Windows photo editting s/w will have tools to do this as well.
I noticed that on the Meural phone app, at the bottom of the screen there are 5 icons, of which the middle one is a camera. When I select that I have the option of "Choose from gallery". If I do that and select a photo, in the lower right corner there is a rectangular icon with 4 dots in the middle. Selecting this allows me to format the selected photo as 16:9.
And finally, at times we have set the Canvas II display option "Fill mode" option to Stretch. This prevents the black border from showing around a non 16:9 photo, but sometimes the image is distorted, which we like to avoid.
Sorry for the lengthy note. I hope it helps!
Hello. I don't even know where to begin with the issues I'm having with the Meural frame. we have photos from over 30 countries with at least 300 - 500 photos from each. Adding them to SD cards and not being able to list the country names is a nightmare. We also use a Mac and that black screen between every two photos is also a pain. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks
Hi,
At the moment we have 6 or so playlists, each with 50 to 60 photos. We created and populated the playlists on the netgear website. Because of that we were able to give the playlists names that relate to the playlist contents. We considered using the SD card approach but decided against it because there can be no more than 4 playlists on the SD card and the playlist names are meaningless.
Selecting the photos to add to the playlists via the netgear website was a labor of love.
Some of our photos are on a Samsung Android phone but most of our photos are stored on a Windows system. Selecting photos from the phone did not work well for us because it is hard to identify photo quality on the small phone screen. We ended up copying phone photos of interest to our Windows system. So over time we looked at our photos, one at a time, and uploaded the good ones to the netgear website.
With your large number of photos the SD card approach is the best way IF there was no limit to the number of playlists and IF we could name the playlists ourselves.
Otherwise it seems building playlists on the netgear website is your only option. Make a big pot of coffee or tea, grab pastries and allocate several evenings?
The other questions that come to mind regarding using the netgear website is
- How many photos would you be allowed to store on the netgear website?
- How many photos can be placed on the Meural Canvas? If the SD card is not used, then the photos are stored on the Canvas itself.
I know there are limits on both. I just don't know what they are at the moment.
Kevin,
I've copied you on this note hoping that you would be able to help out daivad with suggestions on how to best use the Canvas in the described scenario. Also would you please suggest to the Canvas development team to enhance the SD card interface to support
- Unlimited playlists on the SD card (or at least many more than 4)
- Playlists on the SD card can be named by the user
Thanks,
Vic
Vic, Thank you so much for your assistance. You know that while dealing with a netgear rep on the phone, he never mentioned that I could rename folders on their website. This frame is a $500 disappointment and so is their technical support.