I am sure someone has a good easy solution to this project. I thought I could make it work in a few minutes but keep tripping over stupid stuff.
I have a client who wants a sign to display information on a 60" display in the shop on a 24/7 basis. The info can change at any time the office wants to update it. It might be 1 slide or 100+. The data is contained on a debian server in a share. The display is in the shop with a simple linux box driving it (right now xubuntu, but could be anything) and feeding images from the server. My original plan was to just setup the screen saver to display my share. Unfortunately, it does not watch the directory for new images and only shows what is in the share at the time it first starts. I have fooled around with a number of things and what I am doing now is this. in rc.local, I cycle through the display share directory and copy the pictures one by one to a local slideshow directory, to a single file, like this:

while true ; do for i in * ; do cp "$i" ~/slideshow/slideshow.jpg ; sleep 60 ; done ; done

I then run ristretto full screen and display the current slideshow.jpg file. restretto will update the image on the screen (in this case 1 every minute), my copy will always include only the current files.

Problems include ristretto does not auto-scale the image after the first picture. So, if all the pictures are not the same size, I have a problem. The other annoying problem is the cursor/arrow is displayed in the middle of the screen at boot.

I want this to be a no-touch box. regardless of what happens to the power or the pictures in the share, it will pickup and go again simply by plugging it back in. No keyboard, no mouse, it just works.

It does now, but, these problems are annoying.

Anybody have a quick easy solution here? I would think there should really be a quick easy solution here. I don't care which distro. would like it to be light and to be able to turn off all updates/messages from the GUI so I can use an old box and just forget it.

GOT IT! Ok, for anyone that cares or wants to file this for future use, the program you want is FEH. It solves all problems that I had with any other software solution I tried. A single line command will display all images in a directory, regardless of size, display full screen & reload the directory as you update the pictures.
The command line to display the current directory, full screen adjusting small or large pictures to fit, changing the picture every 5 seconds and reloading the directory every 5 seconds is:

feh -FZD 5 -R 5

no pointer appears on the screen and it scales the pictures nicely.

Web site is:
https://feh.finalrewind.org/