Turn a Tablet Into a Digital Photo Frame, Free

The frame you already own

A digital photo frame is a screen that shows photographs in a loop. Most of them are sold as a screen with a frame around it. If you have a tablet propped against a wall, an old laptop, or a monitor with a HDMI cable, the screen is the part that is expensive and the rest is a browser.

This one takes your own pictures and runs them as a slideshow on any of those, and it can be told which hours of the day to do it.

Your photos stay where they are

You add pictures from the device. Nothing is uploaded: the files are read in the browser and kept in its local database.

That matters more here than in most apps. The photographs on a frame in your living room are, by definition, private ones: the people in them, the places, the occasions. Keeping them on the device means they are not sitting on anyone's server, which is the thing a photo frame has no reason to do.

How long each one stays

Set it in seconds, starting at one.

The right number is not a matter of taste, it depends on what is in the picture. Five seconds suits a small screen in a hallway, seen from across the room, where a person registers the shape of a photograph rather than its detail. Thirty suits a holiday photo of four people on a laptop at arm's length. Below four, nobody has time to look away and back.

Three ways to get from one photo to the next

Fade, slide and zoom.

Fade suits portraits: it keeps the screen calm, which matters when it is on the wall for sixteen hours. Slide is neutral and shows motion, which is what you want for a sequence of places. Zoom suits abstract images and landscapes, and it gives the wall something to look at in the moment between photographs, which a flat cut does not.

The hours it runs, and what that really means

There is a start time and an end time. Inside the window the slideshow starts on its own; outside it, it stops.

Here is the part that is easy to get wrong in other apps, so it is worth being precise. The check runs once a minute while the page is open. That means it decides when to start showing and when to stop showing. It does not decide when to wake the device.

A browser cannot turn on a screen that is off. If the tablet is asleep at eight in the morning, the frame will not start at eight in the morning. It starts the next time something wakes the device, and it stays consistent from there. If you want it to run from the moment it boots, that is a setting in the device's own power menu, not here.

Keeping the screen awake

While the slideshow runs, the app holds the screen awake using the browser's Wake Lock.

Without it, a screen blanks after a few seconds of no interaction and your digital photo frame becomes a black rectangle. This is the single problem every photo frame has to solve, and on most browsers there is exactly one way to solve it.

Full screen, and controls that get out of the way

The frame runs full screen with the browser's own controls hidden, so on a tablet against a wall there is no address bar and no navigation: only the photograph.

While the slideshow runs, the controls fade away on their own and come back when you move the mouse or touch the screen. You get out of the way of the picture.

Moving by hand

Previous, next, and play or pause.

Moving by hand is for the first pass, and it is genuinely necessary there: you usually want to skip the picture that came out blurred, and there is no way to fix it afterwards. Once the set is how you want it, the controls fade and the loop takes over.

Setting it up so it stays put

Two practical things decide whether a frame survives a week.

The first is power. A tablet in a frame is on continuously, so it wants a cable that reaches and a charger that does not mind being left plugged in. A battery that lasts six hours is fine for a tablet you use; it is not fine for a tablet that has to stay lit from breakfast to bedtime.

The second is the browser. Once the page has loaded, everything lives in the browser, so putting the tablet in full screen and leaving it there is the whole setup. Close the tab and the frame stops until somebody opens it again. If your tablet has a kiosk or guided-access mode, using it will stop a stray touch from navigating away.

On photographs themselves there is no format to convert and no size to pick. The browser reads whatever is on the device. Photographs taken on a phone fill a modern screen; old scans at low resolution look soft on a big one, which is a matter of the originals rather than of the frame.

What it does not do

Photos and settings live in the browser's own database on the device. They survive closing the tab and restarting the device. Clearing your browsing data erases them.

There is a button that clears everything, and it is there on purpose. That is what you use when you hand the device to somebody else, or when you want the frame back in a neutral state rather than showing the last family holiday to whoever walks past.

There is no cloud gallery and no sync between devices, and there is no way to pull photos from a folder on a network drive.

Getting it

The digital photo frame is free, needs no account, installs from the browser as an app, keeps working with the connection off, and switches between English and Spanish from the same page.