I've built a few things with eink displays and I strongly recommend NOT using simple picture frames (unless they fit perfectly). One way to get a really good looking result is a custom frame. There are tons of custom framing company that will cheaply make you a frame that fits the display with the appropriate cut out.
Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.
I saw in the summary that you planned to open source it, do you still think you'll do it? I was thinking to build one for self (e-ink + battery powered so can move it around), and trying to avoid reinventing the wheel
Thanks for the pointer! I'm from Germany too, and been considering a similar project (using an old tablet) for a while now. This is another company however that would have been better off if the founder wouldn't have used their own name for it. My first thought was "why buy half a frame from these guys when I can get a whole frame elsewhere?"
Nice project BTW! However the coffee stain doesn't look very realistic in black-and-white...
> Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.
Bold statement, what are they offering that's better than going into your typical framing store?
Wow I absolutely love that. The cost of the larger ones has been prohibitively expensive for all the stuff I want to do. I did make a small weather display with one of Waveshare's 6 inch screens, then I 3D printed a stand that gives it a nice frameless look.
Have you considered MIP displays?(1) Memory-in-pixel displays are commonly used on watches, wearables and they can display up to 64 colors in theory. They have high-contrast even in bright ambient conditions.
The largest one I can find in production is only 4 inches,(2) but a tablet-sized one could be great as a display. They don't use much power (just like e-ink) as a MIP watch can last 11+ months without a charge.
AKA transflective, AKA Memory LCD. It neither looks as good as the ipad, nor does it use no power (at idle) or read as easily as the kindle. It still has to use a little power, but it has the advantage of the fast refresh of an LCD, and a million times better than the ipad in the sun
A £3 custom mount board really makes a difference. I've built beautiful looking e-paper pictures using a basic IKEA frame and an custom cut mount from best4frames.
> iCloud photo albums have no API. However, if you share an iCloud photo album to a public link [...]
How do folks feel about the security vs. convenience aspect of this?
I almost talked myself into doing this for our shared family albums, but I know I really shouldn't do it.
Some of our older family members run Windows and iCloud sharing is just horrible there.
Basically, the photos keep disappearing from their computer. It looks like we're not the only one with the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/iCloud/comments/150nq4i/icloud_wind...
I feel really okay with this, but I'm not okay with is that there isn't language to talk transparently about it. Facebook does the same thing (or did, because I haven't used Facebook in a long time), if you copy link to image, you can just forward that, even if the post is private.
This is pretty inherent in image sharing, though. You can just download the image, or if the website limits that you can take a screenshot (let's not get into the debate about DRM and assume that it doesn't work).
Where should you draw the line? Time limited link sharing? Login based doesn't work because you can't share with Grandma - she doesn't know how to login.
We need words and descriptions of these basic patterns, and better ways to Intuit which is in use.
I think the phrase used here quite often is "security through obscurity" when it comes to links. The question is whether people feel comfortable with family photos falling under that principle. They're obviously not meant for public consumption, but the feeling of privacy invasion if a random person stumbled on them is going to vary from person to person. If one was totally comfortable with them being public and has zero reservations about random folks peeking on them, then I'd be surprised if there weren't an even sturdier way to do this publicly (through Flickr or just an open FTP link – but that loses some of the convenience of just an iCloud album for some people).
Its actually damn near impossible to retrieve all of your photos/videos from icloud for a backup if you are using a windows machine to do so. It will constantly fail to sync fully, duplicate files, takes eons to download even on a fast connection, and there are bizarre file format conflicts with certain types of images. Very infuriating, and its been an issues for at least 5 years. 'Buy a mac if you want to actually adhere to proper backup standards' i guess this is the apple stance on the issue.
I've been using icloudpd to get photos off of icloud. It took a while the first time but after that I set it up to only download the latest 500 photos (total number downloaded is usually way under) and run it every few months.
A workaround is to use OneDrive with Camera Upload feature turned on, and then sync this back down to your PC. You can choose how to sort (e.g. folders by year and month).
TBH, the Photos app on Macs is just as bad at this. Especially if you have a LARGE album.
I'll give you exactly the use case, and exactly why that is:
I decided I didn't want to pay for the family 1tb icloud plan anymore because 90% of it was being used up by my brother taking silly pictures and videos all the time. So I had him get an external SSD and set him up with the Photos app to download to it.
~900gb of images and videos. It took OVER. A. MONTH. to download. The whole time the photos app was being very cagey about when it would bother to download. To an M1 iMac. With an 500mbit fiber connection and connected via ethernet.
I think they do that on purpose to discourage people from quitting icloud. They want to keep you dependent on their cloud storage and they REALLY don't want you taking your files back.
I fucking hate icloud. I hate the way apple uses dark patterns and is so naggy about having an icloud membership when using an iPhone. I hate their crappy cloud syncing software too.
I ended up back on icloud later because, well, reasons... but I moved my own photo/video syncing over to onedrive. Now let's not get ahead of ourselves - one drive is a piece of crap too. But at least it's consistent on all platforms. And it's cheap as fuck.
By most standards im fairly security conscious. IE: No listening devices/alexa/google home in the house. For the most part no cameras or mic's inside (obviously cant get past the phone thing). Generally i prefer to self host stuff (ie: my security cams are local only and have no interenet access.)
That said I DID setup a public shared album to share to a Dakboard....Its also one i share with family.
The URL is so long, from a privacy standpoint its less a concern. The facial details are already on the internet due to family sharing stuff on facebook etc. None of the photos are particularly revelealing and nothing i wouldnt care if they were on a billboard...So meh. I doubt i could be targeted to find it and anyone stumbling across it wont see anything they wouldnt see if they drove by my house and saw my kids playing in the front yard. We also dont religiously post to it, so its not like anyone is going to glean we are out of town because of something we put there.
TL:DR - meh, not much a concern on my end, despite other concerns that may border on tinfoil.
I’m mildly surprised that this isn’t an official product. I have half a dozen relatives I’d give “AirFrames” to if Apple made them or let a third party do it, especially if they had decent handling of Live Photos.
I wanted to get a simple, high quality digital frame for some older relatives and I had a hard time coming up with many options to choose from. It seemed like there were two groups of frames. Amazon cheapies and $600+ art frames. If you just want a nice 10" inch digital frame of high quality and at least moderate privacy from random apps with photo access good luck.
Not really. Software for each of them is clunky. You have to first buy one which is wifi enabled. Then you have to download an app from manufacturer and create a login password. Then you have to manually move/upload photos from camera roll to the corresponding app. After this, you have to to back to digital photo frame interface, select the appropriate picture and then tap "display this photo".
All of this should be one step. Ideally Like airdrop. I say "share" and it should magically show up on the photo frame. I should be able to download pics from reddit/imgur and display it on photo frame using a CLI/API.
Which of those integrate with iCloud? Generic picture frames tend to either use USB or their own cloud services/mobile apps, and the exceptions are things like this guy had to do making the album public which many people aren’t willing to do.
I wish Apple would let you do it with old iPads. I know there are apps you can use but it’s a notably inferior experience to a dedicated frame.
I have a second generation (I think) iPad mini that can barely run most web sites and has an OS version too old for most apps. Would be a great boost to Apple’s claims for caring about the environment.
If you're open to donating it, you can give it to an elderly care home of your choice, so the home can use it for WiFi FaceTime. For examples see https://BoldContacts.org.
It's a good gift idea but seems like a lot of trouble to build and maintain a consumer friendly version for what would be a relatively cheap product. Because I can't imagine people paying hundreds of dollars for that.
What he build looks cool but he set it up for his parents and if you were to sell it to them directly it would have to work out of the box. They'd have to be able to share the pictures with the frame with airdrop or something like that. Or maybe an SD card slot for Android users. Anything beyond that will be too complicated for the average user.
> Because I can't imagine people paying hundreds of dollars for that.
We're talking apple customers here. I just spent $300 on "air pods." Would I spend $300 on a two pack of AirFrames? Very maybe! The value of sharing pics with grandparents is huge, especially for those of us without facebook.
I didn’t check to see if it can play from a photo stream directly, because I prefer to use the share button in Photos to send to the app. It handles Live Photos just fine, and will put vertical photos side by side.
The killer function for me would be a private shared folder so new pictures would automatically go to the grandparents. If the Aura software does that, I might have to replace the ones they have currently.
There are already good products out there and I doubt Apple could make much money off of it anyway. If it’s not at least a billion dollar business, why would they even consider it?
Edit: maybe if they make it a HomePod too it would make sense? Just please fix Siri first.
I haven't dug into it enough to see if there's an iPhoto integration, but the Aura frames - generally - have good UX and image quality. They've universally been a hit with grandparents.
10,000 times this. I've bought a handful of Nixplays for my family members, share pictures to them, etc... but an apple ecosystem solution would be great.
Small promo here but: the inability to make collaborative photo albums without some onerous signup/login/auth flow was one that that recently inspired me to make this really simple moodboard website:
When you got to the site (a SPA) it generates a new view/edit url for you. You can immediately drag photos onto the page to add to the gallery, remove them, etc. If you share the edit link with someone else, they can do all the same things. However if you share the link without the edit portion, the site is view only. The API is also public and just uses the edqit key query string for auth (check the network traffic), so I've been building a few apps on top of this as a sort of ad-hoc collaborative CDN thing.
I'm also working to build something similar to OP for my own grandparents and use mood.site as the image backend.
For those who want less tikering: Two 24 inch monitors bought from a design house auction connected to 3rd Gen Chromecasts.
They automatically boot up and display a Google Photos album that contains pictures of the family and pets. These monitors are set to power on at 8 AM and off at 10 PM.
Initially my wife hated the idea of having two monitors in the living room. But after I put them in place, we both found it is a constant reminder of good times - which was helpful in many subtle and unexpected ways.
…or buy a cheap digital picture frame from <mass market retailer>.
When my g-parents passed, and the family moved away, we bought everyone a cheap digital frame linked to a shared family album. They’re like 50-200$ depending on size. My grandmother was always bringing the family together, and we wanted to honor that with way to see each other across geographies.
Our chosen company’s albums have an email address that you email a photo to, and it displays on everyone’s frame. Very easy for everyone to contribute.
I take photos on my iPhone, Google photos automatically uploads and I can set my Google devices to show a specific album or a "highlight" reel which is pretty awesome. Not only does it show recent photos, but also photos from the same time the previous year (ala social media "memories"). It's a wonderful, automatic memory machine!
It sounds like a museum auction or something? If so, that sounds like a nice way to promote an environment to enjoy things. Would make a great entrance/foyer hallway feature.
Design firms frequently upgrade their hardware. So you can frequently find great hardware at very low prices. Also snagged a fully loaded Mac Pro trashcan for $1200 back in 2017 when they all went for the iMac Pros.
I spent $50 for each monitor and additional $50 for 2 x Chromecasts.
Net out, 2 x 24” auto-updating photo frames for <$200.
Awesome. I now see that the app's Play store listing explains this:
When started, Electric Sign will download and display a user-specified web page, then go to sleep for a specified number of (minutes/hours/days). It will then wake up, re-download and refresh the web page, and go back to sleep again.
I guess, but perhaps having an app in the foreground increases power usage? For example, if this app accesses the network a lot (not just when it's time to update the image) this would result in the wifi chipset being awake for longer.
Readit News
https://blog.jgc.org/2023/05/a-better-case-for-my-inkplate-1...
Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.
Nice project BTW! However the coffee stain doesn't look very realistic in black-and-white...
Bold statement, what are they offering that's better than going into your typical framing store?
Example of a color MIP display is the Garmin handhelds: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/553168
The largest one I can find in production is only 4 inches,(2) but a tablet-sized one could be great as a display. They don't use much power (just like e-ink) as a MIP watch can last 11+ months without a charge.
(1)https://www.sharpsde.com/technologies-for/memory-in-pixels/m...
(2)https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sharp-microelectr...
How do folks feel about the security vs. convenience aspect of this? I almost talked myself into doing this for our shared family albums, but I know I really shouldn't do it.
Some of our older family members run Windows and iCloud sharing is just horrible there. Basically, the photos keep disappearing from their computer. It looks like we're not the only one with the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/iCloud/comments/150nq4i/icloud_wind...
also wanted to add API on top so that people can show photos however they want. But didn’t have a time to finish it yet.
This is pretty inherent in image sharing, though. You can just download the image, or if the website limits that you can take a screenshot (let's not get into the debate about DRM and assume that it doesn't work).
Where should you draw the line? Time limited link sharing? Login based doesn't work because you can't share with Grandma - she doesn't know how to login.
We need words and descriptions of these basic patterns, and better ways to Intuit which is in use.
https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
I'll give you exactly the use case, and exactly why that is:
I decided I didn't want to pay for the family 1tb icloud plan anymore because 90% of it was being used up by my brother taking silly pictures and videos all the time. So I had him get an external SSD and set him up with the Photos app to download to it.
~900gb of images and videos. It took OVER. A. MONTH. to download. The whole time the photos app was being very cagey about when it would bother to download. To an M1 iMac. With an 500mbit fiber connection and connected via ethernet.
I think they do that on purpose to discourage people from quitting icloud. They want to keep you dependent on their cloud storage and they REALLY don't want you taking your files back.
I fucking hate icloud. I hate the way apple uses dark patterns and is so naggy about having an icloud membership when using an iPhone. I hate their crappy cloud syncing software too.
I ended up back on icloud later because, well, reasons... but I moved my own photo/video syncing over to onedrive. Now let's not get ahead of ourselves - one drive is a piece of crap too. But at least it's consistent on all platforms. And it's cheap as fuck.
That said I DID setup a public shared album to share to a Dakboard....Its also one i share with family.
The URL is so long, from a privacy standpoint its less a concern. The facial details are already on the internet due to family sharing stuff on facebook etc. None of the photos are particularly revelealing and nothing i wouldnt care if they were on a billboard...So meh. I doubt i could be targeted to find it and anyone stumbling across it wont see anything they wouldnt see if they drove by my house and saw my kids playing in the front yard. We also dont religiously post to it, so its not like anyone is going to glean we are out of town because of something we put there.
TL:DR - meh, not much a concern on my end, despite other concerns that may border on tinfoil.
All of this should be one step. Ideally Like airdrop. I say "share" and it should magically show up on the photo frame. I should be able to download pics from reddit/imgur and display it on photo frame using a CLI/API.
Deleted Comment
I have a second generation (I think) iPad mini that can barely run most web sites and has an OS version too old for most apps. Would be a great boost to Apple’s claims for caring about the environment.
Can you elaborate on how it's inferior? I was thinking of doing this and imagined it'd be straightforward with Single App Mode.
What he build looks cool but he set it up for his parents and if you were to sell it to them directly it would have to work out of the box. They'd have to be able to share the pictures with the frame with airdrop or something like that. Or maybe an SD card slot for Android users. Anything beyond that will be too complicated for the average user.
We're talking apple customers here. I just spent $300 on "air pods." Would I spend $300 on a two pack of AirFrames? Very maybe! The value of sharing pics with grandparents is huge, especially for those of us without facebook.
- big enough but not intrusive
- go off automatically at night
- doubles as audio assistant
Overall, it works really well for us.
I didn’t check to see if it can play from a photo stream directly, because I prefer to use the share button in Photos to send to the app. It handles Live Photos just fine, and will put vertical photos side by side.
https://myereader.net/e-ink-spectra-6.html
https://youtu.be/TEqTg-Pjiag
Edit: And I don't know of any consumer-ready solutions.
Edit: maybe if they make it a HomePod too it would make sense? Just please fix Siri first.
The images look surprisingly good, even on the relatively small, black-and-white display! It definitely has its own aesthetic.
I need to hurry up and ship this! In the meantime, if you're a dev, you can probably use the image url widget to build your own image gallery: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...
https://mood.site
When you got to the site (a SPA) it generates a new view/edit url for you. You can immediately drag photos onto the page to add to the gallery, remove them, etc. If you share the edit link with someone else, they can do all the same things. However if you share the link without the edit portion, the site is view only. The API is also public and just uses the edqit key query string for auth (check the network traffic), so I've been building a few apps on top of this as a sort of ad-hoc collaborative CDN thing.
I'm also working to build something similar to OP for my own grandparents and use mood.site as the image backend.
They automatically boot up and display a Google Photos album that contains pictures of the family and pets. These monitors are set to power on at 8 AM and off at 10 PM.
Initially my wife hated the idea of having two monitors in the living room. But after I put them in place, we both found it is a constant reminder of good times - which was helpful in many subtle and unexpected ways.
When my g-parents passed, and the family moved away, we bought everyone a cheap digital frame linked to a shared family album. They’re like 50-200$ depending on size. My grandmother was always bringing the family together, and we wanted to honor that with way to see each other across geographies.
Our chosen company’s albums have an email address that you email a photo to, and it displays on everyone’s frame. Very easy for everyone to contribute.
I take photos on my iPhone, Google photos automatically uploads and I can set my Google devices to show a specific album or a "highlight" reel which is pretty awesome. Not only does it show recent photos, but also photos from the same time the previous year (ala social media "memories"). It's a wonderful, automatic memory machine!
More info here: https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9136992?hl=en
It sounds like a museum auction or something? If so, that sounds like a nice way to promote an environment to enjoy things. Would make a great entrance/foyer hallway feature.
I spent $50 for each monitor and additional $50 for 2 x Chromecasts.
Net out, 2 x 24” auto-updating photo frames for <$200.
Might do the same with a cheap/used OLED android tablet, though I like the minimalism and power consumption of the e-ink tablet
I wonder whether the power consumption is much lower than that of a regular tablet?
The eInk screen is low power to change, and requires zero power to stay on.
The device sleeps between screen refreshes, and the WiFi power use in minimal.
My nook art screen lasts over a week with refreshes over the day. I don't know of a tablet which has a screen-on time for that long.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/turning-an-eink-screen-into...
Thrift stores (in the U.S.) are gold mines for picture frames. And they probably cost you only a few bucks.