Pixette – Slideshow for NAS

Being able to load and display photos on an iPad from a network-attached-storage device seems like an obvious thing to be able to do. And yet, no one until Pixette seems to have made that possible. But it is now, and it works very well. The developer’s instructions about setting up the NAS properly were clear and pretty easy to follow, even for someone like me who is not very knowledgeable about NAS drives. Plus I had a question or two and wrote to the developer about them—and was delighted to receive a prompt, courteous, and helpful reply. All in all, this is an excellent app that fills a real need.

This app brought new life to an old iPod and is now way better than other dedicated hardware out there. But we have had odd issues that keep it from being perfect… First off, it seems that it doesn’t randomly play ALL files it finds. It’s indexed like 10k pictures but it seems like it rotates through the same small pile over and over. I will often see the same couple of pictures several times in a single day. With over 10k images that shouldn’t happen. Second, this latest update has brought about some oddities. It wiped out my server settings and it’s been awhile since I set that up so had to remember all that. Next, and probably worst so far, the sleep function now doesn’t work as it once did. It used to turn the screen off completely but now it just sits at an illuminated black screen, which uses more power and puts off light all night. Weird. Hopefully these small bits get resolved as overall we love it. Update: Recent update seems to have fixed the sleeping and waking. No more illuminated screen and doesn’t seem to crash tying to wake up anymore. Back to perfect!

My problem - Synology NAS drive with almost 70K photos accumulated over 20+ years and no easy way to view them. Could not find any digital photo frames that could talk to local file server, so got gently used iPad and with this app turned it into very decent slideshow device. Setup was quite straightforward (help link helped) - you need to add WebDAV package to Synology and create user for the app. It discovered all the photos and handled them just fine ( FileBrowserGO app I tried first could not handle slideshow of that size ). As a suggestion - may be make it easier to discover network drives in future versions?