button in the upper right corner of the PhotoGuru Home Screen opens a window that allows you to add your photos and videos to PhotoGuru.
PhotoGuru Media Player V3.2 |
Release Notes |
PhotoGuru Media Player is designed to present photos and videos from various file- and photo hosting services on Android-based phones, tablets, smart TVs and set-top boxes. The intuitive and beautiful user interface gives users easy access to the photos and videos and provides an inexpensive way to showcase them in the most professional way possible. Photos and videos can be played back randomly or can be sorted by file- and picture dates. A wide selection of randomized transition- and frame styles is used to give the impression of a high-quality, interactive slideshow.
The app is compatible with Google’s Android TVs as well as Amazon’s FireTV media players and supports 4K Ultra-HD true-life picture quality on the 4K-capable FireTV 2015 (2nd gen) and NVidia Shield devices. Please note that PhotoGuru does not support 4K rendering on the current (3rd gen) FireTV dongle.
PhotoGuru has been in constant development for the last three years and is currently used as a presentation tool by thousands of professional photographers. It is also used in countless homes and offices to display promotional material and images of family and loved ones on big flat-panel TVs.
The app can be installed from the Amazon- and Google app stores, is completely free and does not contain ads. However, in order to cover the development cost, we ask you to pay a couple of dollars to remove a watermark that appears during the photo- or video presentation.
PhotoGuru accesses photos and videos from an ever increasing number of file- and photo hosting services. In order to prevent accidental changes to photos, PhotoGuru loads all photos and videos in read-only mode which means that it will never modify photos. Note that this also means that PhotoGuru is not a tool to sort or edit your photos – the app’s mission is solely to display photos and videos on your device in the most professional way.
| Hosting Service | Remarks |
| UPnP/DLNA | Universal protocol that is used by most home networking devices (routers, wifi access points, file servers) |
| Local File System | Internal memory of the device as well as to external USB sticks and drives |
| Windows File Server, Samba, CIFS | Any network file server on the local network e.g. QNAP, Drobo, Synology, WD My Cloud |
| WebDAV | BlueCloud and OwnCloud servers |
| Dropbox | |
| Google Drive and Google Photos | Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Plus and Picasa |
| Microsoft OneDrive | |
| Amazon Drive | Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Prime Photos |
| Flickr | Private photos and public Flickr groups |
| Zenfolio | Professional photo hosting service |
Pressing the button in the upper right corner of the PhotoGuru Home Screen opens a window that allows you to add your photos and videos to PhotoGuru.
Follow the on-screen instructions and enter your username and password credentials for the selected photo hosting service.
After you have successfully added the folder, PhotoGuru will automatically mark the new folder with a yellow star.
You can open this folder by clicking on it. Alternatively, if you long-click on the folder for two seconds, you will see a context menu that allows you, amongst other options, to delete the folder or to copy it to the clipboard.
PhotoGuru allows you to to organize bookmarks in nested folders. Bookmarks and folders can be copied to the clipboard and copied back into another folder from the clipboard. Accessing the clipboard works by long-pressing on a folder and selecting ‘Copy folder to clipboard.’ PhotoGuru will automatically display the clipboard contents if a folder gets copied into it. Alternatively, you can open the clipboard by pressing the button in the upper right corner of the Image Browser or by swiping a finger from the right border towards the center of the screen.
Folders that have been copied to the clipboard can be copied back to your Home Screen by long-pressing on the folder in the clipboard or via drag and drop on touch enabled devices. When the clipboard was opened for the first time you may have noticed an empty folder called New Folder at the top of the clipboard. This default folder is always present and can be used to add an empty folder to your Home Screen. Please note that only the Home Screen or folders that were created by adding the New Folder to the Home Screen can contain links to user defined bookmarks.
On touch-enabled devices you can use drag and drop to copy a bookmark to the clipboard by first long-pressing the drag handle in the upper right corner of each folder (marked in red) and then dragging the bookmark into the clipboard that automatically opens. After navigating to another folder (e.g. the Home Screen) you can drag the bookmark out of the clipboard.
Pressing the button marked in red in the thumbnail viewer allows you to sort the images and videos based on filename, file date and capture date. Note that not all hosting services provide the necessary data to support all sorting schemes.
Clicking on a photo or video inside a folder starts the the slideshow. Photos and videos will get played back in the order that was selected in the thumbnail viewer unless Randomize the order of images has been selected in Playback Settings.
You can advance images and videos manually by pressing the Arrow-Left or Arrow-Right buttons on your remote control or by using swipe-left and swipe-right gestures on touch enabled devices. Alternatively, you can let PhotoGuru automatically advance images by pressing the Pause/Play button on your remote control.
PhotoGuru supports a wide variety of different frame- and transition modes that are used to create the impression of a high quality, interactive slideshow. In order to configure these settings, press the Arrow-Down button on your TV's remote or touch anywhere close to the bottom of the screen on a touch-enabled device. This opens the playback toolbar which contains the Playback Settings button.
Most of the options under Playback Settings are self explanatory: You can select the animation speed, transition style, frame options and randomization parameters.
This section will focus on the not so obvious settings that require explanations:
If enabled, PhotoGuru displays EXIF meta data during image playback. Please note that not all images contain EXIF tags and that not all image providers transmit them.
The display of EXIF meta data is customizable under Playback Settings and includes options to display Filename, Captions, Copyright, Exposure settings, Camera/Lens make- and models and location.
An important aspect in PhotoGuru’s design was to allow users to share folders and bookmarks with friends or with other devices that are running PhotoGuru. With the exception of local file system folders, any folder or bookmark can be shared with a few clicks. In order to share bookmarks, long-press on any folders and select Share Folder. Once the bookmark has been shared, PhotoGuru will display a six character Access Code that can be used to import this folder on another device.
In order to import this folder, click on the Add Photos button in the upper right corner of the Home Screen and select Sync- and Share Server. After entering the code that was given to you, the previously shared folder will be accessible. Please note that for security reasons the access code will expire after approximately 24 hours.
ProTip: The sharing feature can also be used to simplify the configuration of the app on devices that have limited keyboard functionality: For example, you can configure PhotoGuru on your tablet and then share this folder with PhotoGuru running on your TV by entering the six character access code via your TV's remote.
The Settings Screen can be opened by clicking on the button in the upper right corner of the Image Browser and selecting Settings in the drop-down menu. There are several settings screens that allow you to modify the behavior of the app:
| Settings Screen | Description |
| Image Browser | The Image Browser Settings allow you to configure everything that is related to how thumbnails are displayed. For example, you can select how many thumbnails you want to see in a row. If PhotoGuru runs on a tablet or phone you have to option to specify the number of thumbnails per row for the horizontal and vertical orientation of the device. Note that on touch-enabled devices you can use the pinch-zoom gesture to change the number of thumbnails in a row. |
| Leanback Browser | The Leanback Browser Settings are only available if PhotoGuru runs on a TV. |
| Playback | The Playback Settings allow you to customize everything that is playback related. For example you can change frame- and transition- styles or you can select which video player you want to use. Please consult the Playback chapter for an explanation of the various settings. |
| Advanced |
There are lots of settings in the Advanced Settings Screen. Most of them are self explanatory and this section will only focus on the most important ones:
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| Daydream | The Daydream settings are only available if your device supports the Daydream screensaver mode. These settings are identical to the Playback Settings and allow you to specify frame- and transition styles that are used while the Daydream screen saver is running. Please note that using external video players during Daydream is not possible. |
PhotoGuru supports an alternate Leanback user interface that is targeted towards users sitting several feet away from the screen. Note that the Leanback Browser is only available if PhotoGuru runs on a TV and that it does not support all the functions that the regular Image Browser provides. For example, there is no clipboard- or Drag&Drop support.
You can start the Leanback Browser from the regular Image Browser by clicking on the corresponding entry in the drop-down list in the upper right corner of the screen and you can close it by pressing the BACK button on your remote control repeatedly.
The Leanback Browser itself has a collapsible left pane that allows you to switch between Leanback Browser Options and displaying your Folders. Folders are shown in a two-dimensional grid and can be opened by using the left-, right-, up- and down- keys of the TV's remote control.
Clicking on an image or video starts the full-screen playback as described before.
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The Leanback Options Screen can be opened by pressing the left button on the TV's remote control repeatedly until the collapsible window pane at the left of the screen appears. This window pane contains a link to the Options Screen that allows you to configure PhotoGuru as explained in the previous chapters and it also allows you to switch back to the standard Image Browser.
The default in PhotoGuru is to open the Image Browser when you the start the app but you can also configure PhotoGuru to automatically start the Leanback Browser under Settings>Leanback Browser.
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PhotoGuru can be configured to run as a Daydream screen saver that automatically starts if the device is charging or is idle. Note that not all devices support Daydream.
In order to configure Daydream, open the Settings screen and select Daydream Settings. The first thing you need to do is to enable Daydream in the system settings of the device by clicking on Enable Daydream in the Daydream Settings screen.
Next, you need to select one or more folders with images that you would like to display when the device is idle: Click on Select photos, navigate to the folder that you want to display, long-press on it for two seconds and select Add folder to Daydream in the popup menu. When you return back to the Home Screen, you will see a newly created folder called Daydream. This folder contains bookmarks to folders that will get displayed while the screen saver is running. You can manually copy and paste bookmarks into this folder as described in the Organizing Bookmarks chapter and you can delete bookmarks by long-pressing on them.
When the Daydream screen saver starts, PhotoGuru will pick a random subfolder of the Daydream folder and enumerate its contents. If this subfolder contains images or videos they will get displayed. Otherwise, PhotoGuru will randomly pick a subfolder, enumerate its contents and if it contains images, they will get displayed. If the folder does not contain images or videos, PhotoGuru will recursively enumerate subfolders until images or videos have been found. After all images or videos in a folder have been displayed or if a user-defined time period has passed, PhotoGuru will start the search process again. The user defined time period can be set under Daydream Settings>Automatically reload image folders during playback. For example, if you set this timeout to two minutes, PhotoGuru will automatically start the playback of another folder after two minutes even if not all images in the current folders have been shown.
Amazon devices do not allow you to select third party Daydream screen savers through the user interface of the device. However, if you have the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) system tool available on your PC and know how to use it, you can change this system setting through external commands. It is beyond the scope of this manual to provide detailed step-by-step instructions but here is a short outline of what you need to do (Note: follow these instructions at your own risk):
settings put secure screensaver_components com.cmpsoft.MediaBrowser/com.cmpsoft.MediaBrowser.DayDream
settings put system screen_off_timeout 5000
Note #1: The value '5000' above is the number of milliseconds (5 seconds) after which the PhotoGuru screen saver will start. Feel free to change it to whatever you desire.
Note #2: Due to a bug, FireTV devices do not reliably support 4K/UHD rendering of images in Daydream mode.
PhotoGuru is free, does not display adds and runs without restrictions but it does politely ask you to pay a small amount that covers the ongoing cost of development by showing an overlay with a yellow Please Pay watermark during image playback. We have been working on this app non-stop for more than three years and every purchase encourages us to invest even more time into it. Proceeds are mostly used to purchase the latest hardware and to pay for translations, customer support, etc.
PhotoGuru is very modular and every module costs a couple of dollars: If you frequently access your images from Flickr, the Please Pay watermark encourages you to pay a couple of dollars for the Flickr module. Once you have purchased this module, the message disappears and you will see all of your Flickr photos without the overlay. If you access photos from another module they will get watermarked unless you purchase that specific module. Once you have purchased three modules we will automatically unlock all modules for you and you will see photos from all providers without a watermark.
Payments are done through in-app purchases that are securely handled by Google and Amazon. You can initiate a payment by clicking on the watermark and then following the on-screen instructions that guide your through the payment process.
Since Google and Amazon are direct competitors, purchases in one store will not automatically get reflected on devices from the other manufacturer. This means that if you purchase/unlock a PhotoGuru module in the Google store, this module will not automatically get unlocked on an Amazon FireTV device and vice versa. If you are planning to run PhotoGuru on a mix of Amazon and Google devices, please install the Amazon App Store on your Google Device and then install PhotoGuru through the Amazon App Store and then pay for the PhotoGuru module through Amazon.
Please contact us if you are running into problems. Our goal is to make this process as painless as possible.
PhotoGuru is compatible with thousands of Android devices that run Android 4.2 (JellyBean) or higher - i.e. pretty much any Android device that has been released during the last 5 years.
Unfortunately, we can't test the app on all available devices and therefore we limit our testing to the following devices that have been released during the last three years:
The app displays photos with the following file formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and supports the following video formats: MP4, 3GP, MKV, MV4, MOV, 3GP, 3G2.
PhotoGuru currently supports the following languages:
The app supports selection and navigation of photos with the remote control as well as game controllers of TVs (Android TV, Amazon FireTV). Below is an image explaining the functionality of the most important buttons:
It is very important for us to get feedback from you. Without knowing what you think about the app or knowing what works and what does not work, we can’t improve the app and we can’t fix bugs.
So, please, if you have questions or ideas how to improve PhotoGuru, email us in English or German at 
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