The tablet in your drawer is a photo frame.
Live The same layout code your screen runs. One photo fills the frame, two tall ones share it.
Paste a Google Photos share link on your phone. You get back a private URL. Open it on the tablet and it runs your album like the screensaver on a Google TV: full bleed, slow zoom, clock and weather in the corner.
- Completely free
- No account
- Works on anything with a screen and internet
How it works
- Make a screen on your phone. Nothing to fill in. You get back a private link, and that link is the screen.
- Add your albums. Paste the share link from a Google Photos album, as many as you like.
- Open the link on the device that will show them. Type it in or scan the QR code, then leave the device plugged in with its screen timeout off.
Change anything later from your phone. It reaches the screen in seconds, without touching the device on the wall.
Tall photos
A tall photo has to be cut down to fill a wide screen. Two of them can share it instead.
The catch
Your photos are served by Google, over links that work for anyone who has them. If one of those links gets out it keeps working, and neither of us can switch it off. What this controls is who reaches your screen, not who reaches a photo once its link is loose. If an album would bother you being passed around, don't put it on a wall.
Anyone with your screen's link can watch it and change its settings. That's as far as it goes. It's no way into your Google account or the rest of your photos, and if the link gets out, make a new screen.
Losing the link matters too. There's no account to get a screen back from, so keep a copy somewhere. The frame can show you its own link, and so can the phone you set it up on.
Reading a big album all the way to the end isn't something Google offers or supports, so they could break it any week. If they do, your screen keeps showing the photos it already has, and this page will say so.
Who runs it, and why it's free
- Who
- Me. Johan Cedborger, one person. I built it for my own flat and I fix it when it breaks.
- Why it's free
- No company, no plan. The photos go straight from Google to your tablet and never touch my server, so at this size it costs me almost nothing to run. Enough screens and that stops being true. I'd rather say that here than have you find out later.
- What I can see
- Not your albums. They're locked before they leave your browser, with a key that stays in your screen's URL and never reaches me. I can see that a screen exists. I can't see what's on it.
- If you want to chip in
- You can buy me a coffee. It unlocks nothing and there's no paid tier. It just puts off the day the sums stop working.
- If I shut it down
- You lose a slideshow, not photos. Your albums stay in Google Photos where they always were.
- If you already self-host
- Use ImmichFrame or Immich Kiosk instead. They're good, and they don't depend on Google.
Free, no account, nothing to fill in.