Organizing Your Photo Files and Preparing Them to Display on Roksbox

There are two ways to view your photos on Roksbox. One way is to use a GUI program called PicaJet to organize your photos and supply information. The other way is to use your video directory structure to provide the information to Roksbox for viewing your photos. This section will discuss the PicaJet method. To use the directory structure method, go to Using Photo Directory Structure.

We will use PicaJet to organize your photos. Download and install PicaJet. During the install, you can take the defaults except on the last window you can uncheck View Readme.txt, and Integration with Windows Explorer.

After the installation is complete, open PicaJet. On the left side of the screen is an area called Categories. This is where you will set up your categories that will be used in Roksbox. For each category, you need to have one subcategory. In Roksbox, the categories will show up at the top of the screen, and subcategories will show up below each category. Each subcategory will be a slideshow. You can have multiple subcategories for each category, but you can have only one level of subcategories below each category. Roksbox won't recognize any subcategories below the first level at this time.

The first thing you should do is create some categories for your pictures. PicaJet comes with some categories already defined, which you can use if you want to. But you will probably want to create some of your own categories. To do this, click the icon at the top of the category window that looks like a book. This will create a new category and allow you to give it a name. Type the name of your category and press Enter to create your category. Some categories that you might want to create would be Vacations, Holidays, Seasons, Birthdays, etc. You don't need to create all of your categories now, you can always add more later.

Once you get your categories created, you need to create some subcategories. To create subcategories, right click on the category that you want to create the subcategory on, then click New as Child. A subcategory will appear under your category. Type the name of your subcategory, and press Enter. Do the same to add more subcategories to your categories.

Once you have your categories and subcategories created, you need to add pictures. The way you add your pictures depends on how you currently have them organized on your hard drive. You can add entire folders, or individual pictures. Most digital cameras store pictures in folders by date. You can load these folders into subcategories, or you can load individual pictures.

To load your pictures, click the Add Images button at the bottom of the screen, then click From Files and Folders. The items on the right side of the screen that say Create Categories from Folders Names, and Create Categories from IPTC keywords should both be unchecked. If not, click to uncheck whichever ones are checked. On the right side of the screen click on the arrow in the field under Attach to Category, and select the subcategory that you want to put your pictures in. Click on the arrow at the end of the Look in field, and browse to where your pictures are located. Select an entire folder by clicking on the folder, or select individual pictures by holding the Ctrl key down and clicking on the pictures you want to load. When you have selected your pictures, click the Import button. Your pictures should appear in the subcategory you selected. Repeat this procedure for all of the other pictures that you want to import.

When you have your pictures imported, click on All files at the top of the Categories window. Then click File -> Export -> Entire Album as XML. Browse to your Photos folder, and type photos.xml in the File name field. Then click the Save button.

You can include a thumbnail image which will be displayed on the Roksbox screen for each folder in the form of a thumbnail.jpg, or thumbnail.png file. The thumbnail file should be in the folder that contains the photos. If there is no thumbnail file, Roksbox will look at the first photo in the folder. If it is less than 100k in size, it will use it as a thumbnail image. If no thumbnail image is found, Roksbox will use a default thumbnail image.

If your first picture is larger than 100k, you can resize it in PicaJet. Usually a size of 400x300 will produce a good size for a thumbnail. If you resize a picture, make sure it is the first picture in the slideshow.

That's it. If you haven't performed steps 6, 7, and 8 yet, do it now, then enjoy your photos with Roksbox on your Roku player.