The only thing I have against XBMC on a rpi is that it turns out to be really slow and you need to buy additional codecs if you want it to work the way you intended it. Then again, I have a first generation RPi with 256mb RAM. The second generation has 512mb of ram. That might work better.
I think that it could work. The problem isn't in response times when doing light tasks like showing pictures. You could even remove Xorg and just use framebuffers if I am not mistaken. Photo server could work if you can find the right software. I don't know if samba is too heavy for a RPi to be honest.
All really needed to create a picture frame is a little hacking on the LCD and use of software which has already been written, like feh combined with X11 as a display server. There will not be too much programming involved. Mostly bash scripting to get the components to behave correctly and some tweaking on the OS itself. Do you have experience with linux?
My experience with linux is in command line hacks on OS X and installing knoppix on a dead PC in order to rebuild a ZFS RAID5 array in man-down formation in order to rescue my data. Which is not to say I wouldn't like more because Apple is swirling the bowl. I've got a Macbook with a near-dead hinge that I intended to Ubuntu up but I've been busy. Kinda seems like my best move would be to buy one and fuck around. Yes?
Seems that way. The cost of entry is quite low and it is great fun. ZFS on linux? That is a new one for me.
It was a thin client that ran embedded linux on a board. Plugged directly into the IDE port. BIOS would boot, hit the thin client on the first IDE port, and the embedded linux would take over. Cheapest, easiest way to build a herkin' NAS back before anyone was building NAS. I had 5 250GB drives back when 250GB drives were $200 per. And it provided ZFS, which everyone thought was badass, so I built the NAS ZFS. Because, after all, the thin client wasn't going to take a shit so why worry? Then the BIOS on the mobo took a shit and took the thin client with it. I had to build a fucking PC just to get my data out of it. Last time I ran RAID5 lemme tell ya.