Picture Commander: Choose Images for Remote Screens

Picture Commander provides a way to select an image from a gallery on one device and have that image automatically displayed on the screen of a remote device. No fancy apps are necessary, this is completely implemented with modern web technology (hooray for Server-Sent Events). All you need is a browser.

The way it works is the following: there’s one “admin” view (/gallery handler) and one “display” view (/viewer handler). Clicking on images in the gallery automatically replaces the displayed image on viewer screens (no page refresh needed). You provide a path to an image folder on server startup. The server will recursively collect all images in that folder hierarchy and present them in the gallery.

This is super-useful when projecting one browser tab to a different screen with say a Chromecast since the gallery tab can then control the projected one. You can also have multiple viewer devices/browsers connected at the same time and they’ll all be updated.

Example of running the server:

./server.py --images_folder=./test_images --port=8080 --host=localhost

Then go to http://localhost:8080/gallery for the admin view and to http://localhost:8080/viewer for the viewer page. Tested with latest Chrome, Firefox and Safari across desktop, Nexus 5/7/9 and iPad.

I need this for running my local Dungeons & Dragons game; as a DM, I want to show the players pictures of maps, characters and other stuff without exposing filenames or thumbnails of pictures that they aren’t supposed to see yet. I was surprised to find that there was no simple and easy way to do this so I wrote Picture Commander.

Picture Commander is free and open-source under the Apache v2 License. Enjoy!