General

I decided to get my grandfather a 7″ i-mate Momento digital photo frame thinking that I could set it up to pull photos from my photoblog via rss. Well, I just got it today and I’m trying to set it up before I go back to Malaysia on 15 December so that he will just have to connect it to the WiFi network to run it

Well, firstly, this thing is super cool! It looks quite slick and the picture quality is quite good as well. You can set it up to pull photos from any PC on your network and I’ve also read that it supports Vista SideShow gadgets which is great if you’re unfortunate enough to be running a Vista machine on your home network. You can also pull pictures off the web by signing up for a Momento Live account but that’s where the problems strt.

Momento Live is actually pretty cool. When you sign-up for an account, which I’m guessing is free since they haven’t asked for any payment yet, you get a Momento Live email address which you can use to send pictures straight to your photoframe. You can also send pictures straight to your photo frame via MMS.

Unfortunately, if you want to do what I want to do (display pictures from your non-Flickr-Windows Live-or-Picasa-powered photoblog via RSS) you’ll be disappointed. Momento Live will actually work pretty well for most people since it can pull pictures from almost anywhere else on the web (Flick RSS, Flickr Tags, Picasa Web Albums, Picasa RSS, Windows Live Spaces, etc.) but not fromyour own RSS. I could sign up for a Flickr account and somehow import all of my photos from my server but then I’m not the only one who’s going to be posting pictures.

I come from a HUGE family and once everyone hears about this they are all going to want to be able to post pictures straight to the frame. So I decided to write a script which basically generates an RSS feed from all photos in a directory. To make it easier for Momento Live to process it I’ve structured in exactly the same way as a Flickr RSS feed but now Momento Live does not recognise the URL as a valid Flickr RSS URL. I’ve sent an email to the Momento Live support team about this and I’m hoping they get back to me soon with some good news.

UPDATE: Momento Live service will be shut down