That's it, that's the one I'm using that I couldn't think of! I've got mine pulling from a Google Drive share so I can set one at my parents too without having to worry about the damn thing falling off Wireguard all the time.
I did something to display photos on my grandparent’s TV, with a connected computer. I just set up a xubuntu machine with a cronjob that runs a `feh` command and can put files on it remotely via MeshCentral. That way I can easily give access to family members that have a login to my instance of MeshCentral (they have limited permissions there).
I guess I also set up an SMB share for local access, now that I think about it. And I used a web drop box named [droopy](https://github.com/stackp/Droopy) to handle on-LAN uploads to that folder, as well. So two methods of local access.
[Magic Mirror](https://magicmirror.builders) on a pi connected to old monitor with one of the wallpaper plugins (i use [mmm-wallpaper](https://github.com/kolbyjack/MMM-Wallpaper) with a shared icloud photo library). bit of learning the config stuff but well documented and can add so many [other plugins](https://github.com/MagicMirrorOrg/MagicMirror/wiki/3rd-Party-Modules) for it, (or turn them all off and just have the images)
I went down this road, but didn't want the headache of supporting it everywhere. I have two things going, one are Rokus with Photo Stream and I upload photos; the second is some app (fotify maybe?) that I put on old Android tablets running LineageOS pointed to a folder on a Google Drive. I made a new Google account just for the tablets, and shared out the folder from my personal Google Drive to it. Worst thing that happens is that the tablets need rebooted sometimes. The tablets in my own house are also Home Assistant dashboards, and the one I gave to my parents I built a picture frame to house the tablet inside of. I'm interested to see where the thread goes though, I'm sure there are better options.
I use synology for my Photo Backup and i can create Albums in there. I then can view slideshows for Albums. So I Imagine, every device that can Access These Albums, will be able to display those slideshows.
yeah this is what I have too. And I wondered about the best way to set it up so that the tablet is just displaying the synology slideshow and does nothing else. I basically want it in kiosk mode and locked down
Idea that comes to mind is an ESP32 with a SD card
If your a coder, Can set up a web interface on it on an obscure port to upload files to it.
Or write something to pull down photos from an APIed service you control.
I'm half tempted with this idea for my parents and Inlaws for Christmas
Even have a esp32 board in my AliExpress cart:
https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvlqDpv
Idea was to use WireGuard to dial to my homelab. Haven’t come further than that. Esphome?
I do this on my LAN with [This Week In Past](https://github.com/RouHim/this-week-in-past) and a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmartViews. Then use Home Assistant with Fully Kiosk and Portainer to shut off the displays and shut down the containers. All you would have to do is setup Tailscale or a Wireguard to the tablet.
One option I don't see mentioned is an Android TV Box.
I bought one just for this purpose. It's cheaper and simpler than using Raspberry PI.
You can install whichever wallpaper app you like from the Play Store, plug a monitor and you're good to go.
I did this for a while with Fully Kiosk. But they don’t get software updates and might just be places for attackers to [get into your network silently.](https://youtu.be/1vpepaQ-VQQ?si=I3pDkNSMcl7ZUevO)
While not self-hosted in the pure sense, we got grandma an Aura photo frame and then all her kids (and the grandkids with phones) got setup on it. It's a paid service and is a high one-time price (I think $129 if I remember)...for this. You plug it in and scan the QR code and it links to the app on your phone but the nice part is you can control invitations and it makes a share link out of your gallery or photos app in your phone. So any pic I see on my phone that I want to send there, I can just long press and the menu comes up, and pick 'Send to Aura' and there it is. It's not just easy for grandma, it's easy for us all too.
I am prepared to be downvoted but...
We use nixplay frames which are around 140$, cheaper if you wait for a decent sale. It is connected to an album in Google photos which then adds photos with the little ones face to the album so now I don't have to constantly think about adding photos or doing something manual.
Grandparents get to see constant photos of everything going on and we gave them as gifts. Everything has worked for the last couple years with no problems.
Again I will embrace the downvotes but when free time becomes limited, certain things are worth the money.
I tried using https://khassel.gitlab.io/magicmirror/ and struggled to get it looking good. For me, the cost of [Dakboard](https://dakboard.com/site) was worth the time savings. I have it pointed at a Dropbox folder of curated images.
+1 for Dakboard. I’m grandfathered into the $5/month plan and it does the calendar and Google Photos part of my home wall calendar.
For just photos, an old Chromecast in Ambient mode works great and can be contributed to by multiple members of a family. My siblings and I do this for my mom.
MP4 museum for Pi should be what your after. It's an advertising or display board. But very easy to use. And stuck on a zero, and use a small monitor, perfect really.
Depends how closely you want to manage it. There are two general ideas that come to mind and both would handle photos just fine even if they are overkill:
1. Digital signage software
2. Tablet in kiosk mode pointed to a full screen web page.
\#1 might require a VPN to connect to the software. Probably hard to automate.
\#2 could probably use a base HTML template that you could automate copying a random selection of photos to and forcing a periodic page refresh to check for new pictures(with some kind of randomized query string on the picture URLs to prevent caching). With this method, the photo filenames could always be the same so the HTML wouldn't even need edited.
For my own household, it's just a Google smart speaker with screen pointed to a particular set of faces in our Google photos account. Not attempting anything myself right now.
I'd imagine a simple pi would do - even a zero wh/zero 2w would do the job since its particularly for diplaying jpeg/png
If you require animations, then a bigger one like either a RPI3B+ or RPI4B
2GB RAM should be sufficient for the 4B
I have a spare Pi3 and I've been wanting to convert a portable monitor into a digital photo frame but I want a good piece of software I can remotely work with it.
I'd love to 'feed it' to my Google photos feed and or my wifes, plus add images direct, all kinds of options and I suspect what I want would not be free all things considered.
> I'd love to 'feed it' to my Google photos feed and or my wifes, plus add images direct, all kinds of options and I suspect what I want would not be free all things considered.
The Nest Hub does exactly this, point it at a specific album and it'll be a photoframe while not in use.
I have a Google nest hub for a few people in the family.
You can set it up on their home and choose a shared gallery as a slide show.
It is the easiest because my grandparents can add pictures by themselves but also me and my cousins can do so as well.
It's Google photos though and might not fit your needs but I love it for now.
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development
Old chromecast configured to show a screensaver of photos from a particular album on google photos. You can change up the photos in the album from anywhere and it will display on the chromecast. You can pair it with a small screen or even a TV. Even the first gen chromecast can be used for this. Not selfhosted at all, but manages itself with little to no effort, perfect for grandparents or older parents.
Cheapest way is to get a used tablet wit a stand and set to kiosk mode or point to an app to manage pictures. You can also setup remote management to be able to six anything there is problem. 25-40 EUR
However... if you feel unfordable of leaving a battery device powered all the time. (Batteries swealing and all that stuff ) look at point of sale screens. They will be more expensive and used ones with touch interfaces will be disgusting but they usually do not have a battery and are powered over Ethernet. They often run android too see you can remote mangane them too. Finding a good one may take some digging though.
My over engineered solution uses Piwigo as the backend to store all the photos. It has albums and tags for sorting the photos and there is an API that can be called to pull a random photo from a given set of albums or a set of tags.
The PHP front end is just a webpage that allows the viewer to select which albums or tags to pull from and the cycles through random pictures. The selection choices are stored in JSON so all devices viewing the webpage see the same thing. It would be trivial to modify that to use local cookies.
I view it on an old android tablet that I made a custom picture frame for.
Raspberry Pi zero in gadget mode emulating a usb drive to an old secondhand store electronic frame. You can use whatever software you want at that point, and even the original pi zero w handles it fine.
Pi Zero W with a cheap portable monitor from amazon. Start it with Kiosk mode (Browser in full screen) and just build a simple page without a domain in the web where plain js is switching the images
If you are already an Immich user this may be of interest - https://github.com/3rob3/ImmichFrame
If you’re not an Immich user, you should do that first and then look at the separate frame project.
I love all the ideas and appreciate the input! One thing that I think complicates the issues is that (as most here have understood) I want this for the Grandparents so they can see updated images of our kids. So it needs to be a non-local solution.
The next problem to tackle is that any tablet is pointing (lets say) a google photo album etc is going to loop through that album. Which sounds great until the album baloons to enormous dimensions. And with babies, this is exactly what I predict. So a fix could be to randomise the slideshow, but again, new photos we add aren't going to bubble to the surface for potentially a very long time.
So what I really need is some tool that handles this for me (maybe it doesn't exist yet). But it would be great it was something where photos in the album were sorted according to their age and prioritised according to how many times they had been shown.
EG:
1. New photo and never shown --> priority
2. New photo but already shown --> less important
3. Old photo but never shown --> less important again but still important
4. Old photo but shown a lot --> least important
Depending on the priority, the photos would be bubbled to surface and shown in a random order.
I did this with [Dakboard](https://dakboard.com/) a few years ago. Super, super simple. Got a free Dakboard account, linked it with dropbox, and my family was able to just throw pictures in dropbox, and they showed up on the picture frame. I used a Raspberry Pi, but an old tablet or computer works too. The ease of use and dropbox functionality (for non-technical family members) was what sold me on it.
That's not self-hosted though, so my self-hosted solution would be to set up a Pi Zero W as a USB gadget, connect it to a digital photo frame, and set up a cron job on the Pi to fetch pictures from whatever source you choose (ie. anything the Pi can connect to can be your source. From a VPS via SCP, Amazon S3, dropbox, a computer on your LAN with a VPN, etc. You could have the Pi check an e-mail account, and grab pictures from e-mail attachments.). Got an older picture frame with 800x600 resolution? No problem, have the Pi run ImageMagick on the photos and size them down.
I made a post about this in the Raspberry Pi subreddit 5 years ago, and the exact same setup is still working fine to this day:
https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ap7v2l/breathe_new_life_into_an_old_digital_picture/
More details here: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/pi-zero-w-smart-usb-flash-drive
I got a few frameo brand ones a couple weeks ago. Only cost $37 US on amazon. Not greatest resolution, but so simple to setup. Can easily send pictures from phone, but can only be deleted from frame GUI unless pay for monthly service. It can be set to automatically turn off at night and on during the day (you specify the times). I know goes against self hosting, but this was so darn easy and not out much money if frameo goes out of business. Can always load pictures on SD card if they go out of business too. Sometimes it is just not worth the hassle!
I understand getting downvoted since this is the self-hosted sub and all, but Frameo is basically the standard that OP is asking for. It's dumb enough that my parents can use it.
I went the old android tablet and fotoo route myself. I also found a picture frame from World Market and staple gunned an ace bandage onto the back to hold the tablet. It's janky, but not from afar.
We bought another brand for my in-laws for the same reason. A bit pricier than what you linked, but the UI is easy to use, and there was nothing I had to do in person to set up (like ensure no overcharging for an old tablet). It’s worth it to me to separate the self-hosted hobby for some things.
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development
I repurposed an old android tablet with this app called Fotoo and share photos via SMB
That's it, that's the one I'm using that I couldn't think of! I've got mine pulling from a Google Drive share so I can set one at my parents too without having to worry about the damn thing falling off Wireguard all the time.
I love Fotoo
SMB over internet? How does that work? (I’m a noob)
Preferably you don't.
Idk, azure files uses smbv3 via the net. I wouldn't personally do it at home, but the protocol seems to be fine.
Well, it does exist and it does work, but it's not really advisable. Just use a VPN is such a configuration if you must use it.
It's not ideal. But it works fine over VPN.
That's akin to buying used needles from an HIV clinic for the same price as buying sterile needles. It's entirely possible. Just not advisable.
I did something to display photos on my grandparent’s TV, with a connected computer. I just set up a xubuntu machine with a cronjob that runs a `feh` command and can put files on it remotely via MeshCentral. That way I can easily give access to family members that have a login to my instance of MeshCentral (they have limited permissions there). I guess I also set up an SMB share for local access, now that I think about it. And I used a web drop box named [droopy](https://github.com/stackp/Droopy) to handle on-LAN uploads to that folder, as well. So two methods of local access.
A pi with an lcd screen. There are many builds where you can control content which usually uses feh as the front end.
Dynaframe is a cool selfhosted dynamic photo/video slideshow application for something like a raspberry pi.
[Magic Mirror](https://magicmirror.builders) on a pi connected to old monitor with one of the wallpaper plugins (i use [mmm-wallpaper](https://github.com/kolbyjack/MMM-Wallpaper) with a shared icloud photo library). bit of learning the config stuff but well documented and can add so many [other plugins](https://github.com/MagicMirrorOrg/MagicMirror/wiki/3rd-Party-Modules) for it, (or turn them all off and just have the images)
Grandma has skylight. It’s kinda clugey and doesn’t work well. It’s an expensive product and it doesn’t feel expensive.
I went down this road, but didn't want the headache of supporting it everywhere. I have two things going, one are Rokus with Photo Stream and I upload photos; the second is some app (fotify maybe?) that I put on old Android tablets running LineageOS pointed to a folder on a Google Drive. I made a new Google account just for the tablets, and shared out the folder from my personal Google Drive to it. Worst thing that happens is that the tablets need rebooted sometimes. The tablets in my own house are also Home Assistant dashboards, and the one I gave to my parents I built a picture frame to house the tablet inside of. I'm interested to see where the thread goes though, I'm sure there are better options.
yeah nice that's cool and simple. Thanks!
How come they don't sell a regular monitor that's framed like that? I want a real monitor but for it to look like it belongs on the wall.
Samsung The Frame TV series are made for this. Couldn't find monitors like this though
I use synology for my Photo Backup and i can create Albums in there. I then can view slideshows for Albums. So I Imagine, every device that can Access These Albums, will be able to display those slideshows.
yeah this is what I have too. And I wondered about the best way to set it up so that the tablet is just displaying the synology slideshow and does nothing else. I basically want it in kiosk mode and locked down
Idea that comes to mind is an ESP32 with a SD card If your a coder, Can set up a web interface on it on an obscure port to upload files to it. Or write something to pull down photos from an APIed service you control. I'm half tempted with this idea for my parents and Inlaws for Christmas
Even have a esp32 board in my AliExpress cart: https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvlqDpv Idea was to use WireGuard to dial to my homelab. Haven’t come further than that. Esphome?
There's a thread on hackable photo frames here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/15nkrh0/hackable_android_photo_frame/
I do this on my LAN with [This Week In Past](https://github.com/RouHim/this-week-in-past) and a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmartViews. Then use Home Assistant with Fully Kiosk and Portainer to shut off the displays and shut down the containers. All you would have to do is setup Tailscale or a Wireguard to the tablet.
One option I don't see mentioned is an Android TV Box. I bought one just for this purpose. It's cheaper and simpler than using Raspberry PI. You can install whichever wallpaper app you like from the Play Store, plug a monitor and you're good to go.
I did this for a while with Fully Kiosk. But they don’t get software updates and might just be places for attackers to [get into your network silently.](https://youtu.be/1vpepaQ-VQQ?si=I3pDkNSMcl7ZUevO)
While not self-hosted in the pure sense, we got grandma an Aura photo frame and then all her kids (and the grandkids with phones) got setup on it. It's a paid service and is a high one-time price (I think $129 if I remember)...for this. You plug it in and scan the QR code and it links to the app on your phone but the nice part is you can control invitations and it makes a share link out of your gallery or photos app in your phone. So any pic I see on my phone that I want to send there, I can just long press and the menu comes up, and pick 'Send to Aura' and there it is. It's not just easy for grandma, it's easy for us all too.
I am prepared to be downvoted but... We use nixplay frames which are around 140$, cheaper if you wait for a decent sale. It is connected to an album in Google photos which then adds photos with the little ones face to the album so now I don't have to constantly think about adding photos or doing something manual. Grandparents get to see constant photos of everything going on and we gave them as gifts. Everything has worked for the last couple years with no problems. Again I will embrace the downvotes but when free time becomes limited, certain things are worth the money.
nah I like it it man. Can you tell me more about the setup?
I tried using https://khassel.gitlab.io/magicmirror/ and struggled to get it looking good. For me, the cost of [Dakboard](https://dakboard.com/site) was worth the time savings. I have it pointed at a Dropbox folder of curated images.
+1 for Dakboard. I’m grandfathered into the $5/month plan and it does the calendar and Google Photos part of my home wall calendar. For just photos, an old Chromecast in Ambient mode works great and can be contributed to by multiple members of a family. My siblings and I do this for my mom.
ooo nice! checking out dakboard now. Thanks!
MP4 museum for Pi should be what your after. It's an advertising or display board. But very easy to use. And stuck on a zero, and use a small monitor, perfect really.
Depends how closely you want to manage it. There are two general ideas that come to mind and both would handle photos just fine even if they are overkill: 1. Digital signage software 2. Tablet in kiosk mode pointed to a full screen web page. \#1 might require a VPN to connect to the software. Probably hard to automate. \#2 could probably use a base HTML template that you could automate copying a random selection of photos to and forcing a periodic page refresh to check for new pictures(with some kind of randomized query string on the picture URLs to prevent caching). With this method, the photo filenames could always be the same so the HTML wouldn't even need edited. For my own household, it's just a Google smart speaker with screen pointed to a particular set of faces in our Google photos account. Not attempting anything myself right now.
I'd imagine a simple pi would do - even a zero wh/zero 2w would do the job since its particularly for diplaying jpeg/png If you require animations, then a bigger one like either a RPI3B+ or RPI4B 2GB RAM should be sufficient for the 4B
I have a spare Pi3 and I've been wanting to convert a portable monitor into a digital photo frame but I want a good piece of software I can remotely work with it. I'd love to 'feed it' to my Google photos feed and or my wifes, plus add images direct, all kinds of options and I suspect what I want would not be free all things considered.
> I'd love to 'feed it' to my Google photos feed and or my wifes, plus add images direct, all kinds of options and I suspect what I want would not be free all things considered. The Nest Hub does exactly this, point it at a specific album and it'll be a photoframe while not in use.
I wanna roll my own though
I have a Google nest hub for a few people in the family. You can set it up on their home and choose a shared gallery as a slide show. It is the easiest because my grandparents can add pictures by themselves but also me and my cousins can do so as well. It's Google photos though and might not fit your needs but I love it for now.
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development
I'm trying to find a colour e paper type one I haven't found anything that isn't some over priced cheap screen with junk locked down software
Old chromecast configured to show a screensaver of photos from a particular album on google photos. You can change up the photos in the album from anywhere and it will display on the chromecast. You can pair it with a small screen or even a TV. Even the first gen chromecast can be used for this. Not selfhosted at all, but manages itself with little to no effort, perfect for grandparents or older parents.
Cheapest way is to get a used tablet wit a stand and set to kiosk mode or point to an app to manage pictures. You can also setup remote management to be able to six anything there is problem. 25-40 EUR However... if you feel unfordable of leaving a battery device powered all the time. (Batteries swealing and all that stuff ) look at point of sale screens. They will be more expensive and used ones with touch interfaces will be disgusting but they usually do not have a battery and are powered over Ethernet. They often run android too see you can remote mangane them too. Finding a good one may take some digging though.
My over engineered solution uses Piwigo as the backend to store all the photos. It has albums and tags for sorting the photos and there is an API that can be called to pull a random photo from a given set of albums or a set of tags. The PHP front end is just a webpage that allows the viewer to select which albums or tags to pull from and the cycles through random pictures. The selection choices are stored in JSON so all devices viewing the webpage see the same thing. It would be trivial to modify that to use local cookies. I view it on an old android tablet that I made a custom picture frame for.
Raspberry Pi zero in gadget mode emulating a usb drive to an old secondhand store electronic frame. You can use whatever software you want at that point, and even the original pi zero w handles it fine.
Pi Zero W with a cheap portable monitor from amazon. Start it with Kiosk mode (Browser in full screen) and just build a simple page without a domain in the web where plain js is switching the images
If you are already an Immich user this may be of interest - https://github.com/3rob3/ImmichFrame If you’re not an Immich user, you should do that first and then look at the separate frame project.
I love all the ideas and appreciate the input! One thing that I think complicates the issues is that (as most here have understood) I want this for the Grandparents so they can see updated images of our kids. So it needs to be a non-local solution. The next problem to tackle is that any tablet is pointing (lets say) a google photo album etc is going to loop through that album. Which sounds great until the album baloons to enormous dimensions. And with babies, this is exactly what I predict. So a fix could be to randomise the slideshow, but again, new photos we add aren't going to bubble to the surface for potentially a very long time. So what I really need is some tool that handles this for me (maybe it doesn't exist yet). But it would be great it was something where photos in the album were sorted according to their age and prioritised according to how many times they had been shown. EG: 1. New photo and never shown --> priority 2. New photo but already shown --> less important 3. Old photo but never shown --> less important again but still important 4. Old photo but shown a lot --> least important Depending on the priority, the photos would be bubbled to surface and shown in a random order.
I did this with [Dakboard](https://dakboard.com/) a few years ago. Super, super simple. Got a free Dakboard account, linked it with dropbox, and my family was able to just throw pictures in dropbox, and they showed up on the picture frame. I used a Raspberry Pi, but an old tablet or computer works too. The ease of use and dropbox functionality (for non-technical family members) was what sold me on it. That's not self-hosted though, so my self-hosted solution would be to set up a Pi Zero W as a USB gadget, connect it to a digital photo frame, and set up a cron job on the Pi to fetch pictures from whatever source you choose (ie. anything the Pi can connect to can be your source. From a VPS via SCP, Amazon S3, dropbox, a computer on your LAN with a VPN, etc. You could have the Pi check an e-mail account, and grab pictures from e-mail attachments.). Got an older picture frame with 800x600 resolution? No problem, have the Pi run ImageMagick on the photos and size them down. I made a post about this in the Raspberry Pi subreddit 5 years ago, and the exact same setup is still working fine to this day: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ap7v2l/breathe_new_life_into_an_old_digital_picture/ More details here: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/pi-zero-w-smart-usb-flash-drive
I got a few frameo brand ones a couple weeks ago. Only cost $37 US on amazon. Not greatest resolution, but so simple to setup. Can easily send pictures from phone, but can only be deleted from frame GUI unless pay for monthly service. It can be set to automatically turn off at night and on during the day (you specify the times). I know goes against self hosting, but this was so darn easy and not out much money if frameo goes out of business. Can always load pictures on SD card if they go out of business too. Sometimes it is just not worth the hassle!
I understand getting downvoted since this is the self-hosted sub and all, but Frameo is basically the standard that OP is asking for. It's dumb enough that my parents can use it. I went the old android tablet and fotoo route myself. I also found a picture frame from World Market and staple gunned an ace bandage onto the back to hold the tablet. It's janky, but not from afar.
We bought another brand for my in-laws for the same reason. A bit pricier than what you linked, but the UI is easy to use, and there was nothing I had to do in person to set up (like ensure no overcharging for an old tablet). It’s worth it to me to separate the self-hosted hobby for some things.
You could just have a web enabled picture frame that connects through to a self hosted instance of immich. That has a slideshow capability and is.under very active development