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Comment by yetanother12345 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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