blahhh i really want to do a larger format one for art but scared of the hardware part of it not being that technical. seems like there are more people doing it.
Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#22Nice! The wood frame makes all the difference. Any way to add auth so it doesn't have to be a publicly shared album?
Might do the same with a cheap/used OLED android tablet, though I like the minimalism and power consumption of the e-ink tablet
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#23> I bought this pack of 8x10 frames off Amazon Thrift stores (in the U.S.) are gold mines for picture frames. And they probably cost you only a few bucks.
You are absolutely correct. When I built my eink display calendar, I sourced picture frame for $2 at a local Goodwill store.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#25blahhh i really want to do a larger format one for art but scared of the hardware part of it not being that technical. seems like there are more people doing it.
Visionect makes some excellent eInk displays that take care of all the hardware for you. The tradeoff is they're not cheap.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#26I’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 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.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#27> iCloud photo albums have no API. However, if you share an iCloud photo album to a public link, you can use the Developer Tools to inspect the API requests Apple is making to get the photos. That's clever. I tried something similar to get shared Calendar (Apple) events for the eInk project I put together. I wish there were a better, less hackish API I could have called.
Yep, just switch the calendar to "public" and you can just use it with any CalDav client or icalendar libraries like https://github.com/pat/calendav. Nothing hacky about that, just a standard.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#28I mean cool but... but really wasn't expecting shoving an eink tablet in a frame lol, was excited for a new big eink display with esp32 or raspi
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#29very nice.
Years ago I did something like this with an old broken-but-working macbook for showing photos and cinemagraphs in a frame. Similar matte, but I added a webserver so it would run offline.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#30Small 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.