For some celebrities, it was a nightmare that came true: having their photos stolen from their phones. I set up a Raspberry Pi to do exactly that: stealing the photos from my own phone, with my complete permission.
The screen that started it all
An iPad 2 panel, without the iPad
Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek
I had an old iPad 2 that had been dropped, cracking the screen. Rather than just throwing it away, I decided instead to rip out the undamaged LCD panel from beneath the glass and put it into a photo frame. Using an HDMI controller board, I was able to hook the display up to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and display whatever I wanted on the screen.
I have it set up as a “now playing” screen next to my TV. When I’m watching a movie through Jellyfin, the frame displays the appropriate movie poster. If I’m watching TV, it shows the current channel and an image of the current show.
When I’m not watching anything, the frame shows a family photo that I’d uploaded to the Raspberry Pi. It’s a lovely photo, but I started to wonder if there was a way to display a rotating selection of different photos instead.
Brand
Raspberry Pi
Storage
8GB
It’s only recommended for tech-savvy users, but the Raspberry Pi 5 is a tinkerer’s dream. Cheap, highly customizable, and with great onboard specs, it’s a solid base for your next mini PC.
I was hoping I could use Immich
My Raspberry Pi doesn’t have the muscle
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
I already run Immich as a way to back up my photos and videos. I knew that with Immich I could automatically pull photos from my phone, but the problem was that I was running the frame from a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which only has 1 GB of RAM. Immich recommends at least 6 GB of RAM, so that wasn’t going to be an option.
I could have set up the Pi to pull photos from Immich running on my mini PC, which would have been easy enough to do, but I wanted to see if I could get everything running independently on the Pi. That way, if I ever moved Immich or stopped using it, the frame would continue to work.
Skipping the photo server entirely
Apple does the hard part for free
Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek
I wanted a simple way for both my wife and me to add photos that the frame could display. We both have iPhones, and we already have some shared albums set up. I wanted a way to get the Raspberry Pi to pull photos from a dedicated shared album and show them on the frame.
The key was a free tool called PyiCloud. It’s a Python module that allows you to connect to iCloud using your username, password, and two-factor authentication (2FA), and then read what’s in any photo album. I added a small Python script, and on the first run, it asked me to sign in to my iCloud account and enter the 2FA code. Once I was signed in, a small session file was saved to disk so that I wouldn’t continually have to sign back into the iCloud account.
Using a systemd timer, the script runs automatically every three hours and looks at the shared album. It compares what it finds to the files that have already been saved to the Raspberry Pi. If a new photo is found in the shared album, it’s automatically saved to the Pi, and if a file on the Pi no longer appears in the shared album, it’s deleted from the Pi.
This means that we can add or remove shared album photos whenever we want, and within a maximum of three hours, the photos stored on the Pi will exactly match the photos in that shared album. All we have to do is find our favorite photos and add them to the album, and the Raspberry Pi steals them and saves them ready to be displayed.
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Turning the screen into an updating photo frame
A new photo is displayed every 15 minutes
Once I’d set up the Raspberry Pi to pull the photos from the shared album, all that was left to do was to get them to appear on the photo frame. It was set up so that the default behavior was to show the “now playing” image when something is being watched, and to fall back to showing a single photo when the TV isn’t in use.
The final step was to get the Raspberry Pi to show a rotating selection of the images it had pulled from my phone. Every 15 minutes, a random photo is selected from the stored files and displayed on the screen. It means that when we’re not watching TV, we get a rotating digital photo frame that updates every quarter of an hour.
Changing the photos that appear is as simple as adding or removing photos from the shared album on our phones. Everything else is handled by the Raspberry Pi. It works exactly how I wanted and is a great way to display photos that would otherwise just be stuck on our phones.
Even older Raspberry Pis can be useful
Despite the fact that my Raspberry Pi 3B+ wasn’t powerful enough to run Immich, that didn’t stop it from getting the job done. You don’t always need the most powerful hardware to achieve what you want; there’s a lot that even the older Raspberry Pi models can do.