RSS Photoframe app for Android

Question

I have an old, slow Android tablet which is of not much use for "interactive use". I'd like to hang it on the wall and use it as a web-enabled photoframe.

There are sites, where users post new artwork every few minutes, and the sites make the recent images available as RSS feed. So, theoretically, point your RSS reader to the site, and have new images displayed as they come?

Well, not quite. Most RSS readers display list of items, where you have to pick the newest to open it in full screen, and it won't refresh unless you go back to the list. Some show 'ticker' style cycle of recent articles, but you're lucky to see a thumbnail of the attached image, never mind displaying it full-screen. One to automatically display the image from newest article (or cycle through newest articles) - nope.

So, I'm looking for an RSS reader / photoframe crossover app:

• Grab RSS from user-specified RSS, auto-refresh for new articles.
• Load and display images from the articles, not just thumbnails but the images full-size, adapted to screen - either from the newest article, or cycle through a number of articles in the feed (or some other reasonable algorithm).
• Autorefresh with RSS updates
• Require no user interaction during operation, display no commercials, minimize amount of clutter, like interface elements etc - be an elegant photoframe app.

Paid apps are acceptable. If you know apps that use different kinds of feeds (ATOM, etc) or generally other way of finding new images, that would be welcome too.

Answer 1

RSS Photo Show seems to fit the bill here.

RSS Photo Show is a full screen application that shows images/photos from an RSS flow. It can be used to turn your smart phone or tablet to a photo frame that shows online images from any service that makes its images available as a RSS image flow. […] It shows the images as a continuous automatic slideshow and also lets you swipe left/right to go to previous or next image manually. […] It's possible to select from a number of predefined flows but you can also specify the address to your own personal RSS flow with your own images/photos.

Here is a look at the available settings:

^{Settings screen (click image for larger variant)}

The downsides are that it doesn't seem to have good control over how images are displayed (e.g. no stretch, crop or fit options) and the developer doesn't seem very responsive. The one review include a request for image viewing options:

Please add the ability to fill screen with image (keeping aspect ration of original image).

But the app is still at the version he reviewed (1.0.1) so you probably shouldn't expect much progress (unless he get's excited about new users!).

Other that the settings page there isn't much to see as the app does run full screen, so here is a gratuitous picture that I got to show up on it using the RSS feed from my flickr:

Answer 2

Showr might be a good candidate as well. You didn't specify which Android version your device is running (Showr requires at least Android 3.0), but assuming that condition is met, Showr should meet your requirements:

• Grab RSS from user-specified RSS, auto-refresh for new articles: That's what it's for.
• Load and display images from the articles [...]: Yepp, exactly that. Though Showr does (at least in it's current version) not "cycle through" a feed, but always shows the latest image.
• Autorefresh with RSS updates: Yes, it does
• Require no user interaction during operation [...]: Should fit as well.

Thing with Showr is: it lets you define widgets based on RSS feeds. So with the widget size you control the part of the screen covered. You even can have multiple widgets (with different sources) on one screen:

^{Showr with multiple widgets in action (Source: Google Play; click image for larger variant)}

As I wrote, cycling through a feeds images is currently not supported. While writing this, I asked its dev, and he just confirmed that's on the to-do-list already.

Disclosure: I'm not personally using Showr (at least not at the moment), but have good contact to its author – who is one of the most activest participants over at Android Enthusiasts. So if you've got further questions on this app, feel free to meet Dan Hulme in our chat room there.