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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The keywords that you would want to enter into your preferred search engine are:

   Digital Picture Frame

At this point in time that is already a regular product category. The OP could just have bought one, but chose the DIY path.

Show me one that hooks up directly to iCloud though. We got one for grandparents and its just full of proprietary crap specific to that app.

The problem here is that iCloud is the proprietary crap. They don't offer an appropriate API to get photos out. It'd be easier if you were starting with pictures in something more accessible.

That said, I think Aura frames will sync from iCloud via their phone app. Not sure how well it works.

> They don't offer an appropriate API to get photos out.

There's this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit ("The framework provides access to photos on the person’s device and in iCloud.")

If you want to use undocumented APIs on non-Apple devices directly, there are projects like https://github.com/steilerDev/icloud-photos-sync and https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... that appear to be able to do this.

Yes, you have to build an app that runs on a device owned by someone with access to the album.

Google Photos, by comparison, has a REST API.

I've got an app that uses that to upload to S3. It's pretty straightforward.

My MIL has one and loves it. It even plays Live Photos.

There are multiple apps that will keep your iCloud Photos synced to various blob storage services. If you just want to maintain a copy or have direct access to photos, that will be a lot easier than a webservice API anyway.

We kinda got something like this working for a relative. They have an "Aura" frame, and in their app you can set a watch folder/album. So we have a shared iCloud album set as the source and it automatically updates based on the images in that shared album.

Yeah, we use an Aura hooked up to Google Photos rather than iCloud, but I think it's similar from the Aura UX perspective. It's super easy to use, and the photos just show up in the frame rotation whenever we add a photo to the corresponding album in Google Photos (which we already use for backing up and organizing photos).

Look up the "Aura frame". It syncs with Google photos and iCloud photos. Works great.

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.

Yeah, and almost all of them suck, in terms of build quality, features, privacy and software.

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.

But none with an official fruit logo!

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.

> I know there are apps you can use but it’s a notably inferior experience to a dedicated frame.

Can you elaborate on how it's inferior? I was thinking of doing this and imagined it'd be straightforward with Single App Mode.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong here but I have a Google Home that I'd like to replace with an iPad. One thing it does beyond just showing pictures is brighten and dim the screen according to ambient light. When the lights are off it dims entirely into a night mode-like display that just shows the time. I've not seen an iOS app capable of the same (I'm not even sure if API access allows it?)

Excellent question.

> I've not seen an iOS app capable of the same (I'm not even sure if API access allows it?)

I don't believe apps can change system brightness settings themselves, but iOS does have an auto-brightness feature, and the app can additionally dim images or change what's displayed based on brightness or movement (using Camera access), time of day, and other signals.

They can, here’s the API to do so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscreen/161...

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 just have Google One or whatever, and have my photos synced to both services. Then I use the Google home assistant frames. They're pretty good:

- big enough but not intrusive

- go off automatically at night

- doubles as audio assistant

Overall, it works really well for us.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aura-frames/id990062908

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.

I have a Google Photos album (shared with a few close family members) that automatically adds photos of my daughter and syncs them with the Aura frames her grandparents have. We've had this setup for the last two years and it works really well. I think it's literally the use-case Aura is targeting.

I don’t use Google any more but it looks like they have the same functionality for iCloud. I’ll have to give that a try since it’d be perfect for our older relatives.

The official product is E-Ink Spectra, as of 2023 it has a complete colour spectrum. Not cheap, though.

https://myereader.net/e-ink-spectra-6.html

https://youtu.be/TEqTg-Pjiag

Edit: And I don't know of any consumer-ready solutions.

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.

I have been working on adding an image gallery wideget to the The Invisible Smart Screen (https://shop.invisible-computers.com)

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...

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.

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