Sidenote, are these frames any good? Aura seems to advertise on a few podcasts I listen to but I’m curious how people in the real world feel about them
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I can tell you it's a very good digital picture frame for my needs that gets less convenient with this change by Google. I have one and gave one to my parents. This feature allows everyone with access to a shared Google photo album to contribute without an extra account or software and my parents get pictures of their grandchildren and what not. Also since the frame does nothing else but display pictures and play short videos it only needs to be plugged in and it does it's thing. It is quite wonderful to be honest. It is a shame that Google is taking this joy away.
Stop using Google products. Uninstall Chrome, delete Gmail, etc.
Sounds like a Nest Frame is preparing for release to me
Here's a slightly convoluted but effective way of syncing a dumb/simple digital frame with Google photos, by means of a raspberry pi zero
This API changes takes away the reason I pay for Google One storage so I can cancel it. If I understand the article correctly I can move to iPhone to keep a similar feature, I just need to heart s photo to add it. Might as well abandon Google altogether.
I dumped Google photos for self hosted immich and it's been great. Not sure if it has the ability to connect to photo frames but if you already self host anything else it's not too much work to setup.
I dumped Google photos for self hosted immich and it’s been great.
I went to install immich but it was very heavy... I don't need AI in a selfhosted Google Photo's replacement.
a self-hosted* Google Photos* replacement
I'm sorry, but then you are the minority. AI image categorization and face recognition is amazing for finding specific pictures quickly
I wasn't super thrilled about the idea myself, but with the ability to disable it I figured I'd give it a try.
Personally it's a really cool feature that adds to the experience.
This is one of the few things I can get behind with machine learning. Locally run, doesn't "phone home", just analyzes faces and categorizes them. That's it.
That's great when your photos have faces. Mine mostly don't. Also they don't come from my phone. So Google is also fairly useless.
It also works on simple objects, not as good as Google yet but good enough for me. I can search for keyboard or bicycle and find pictures that way.
That's good to know. I'm using digikam, but I'm always interested in options
That's fair.
Those features can be disabled to ease up on resources.
I got it running on a raspberry pi and have disabled the machine learning parts in the docker compose file. Works great.
It's really not that heavy. I have Immich - and several other services - running on a 4-core VM with 16GB RAM, running on 7th gen Intel hardware alongside another 4c/16GB VM and several LXC containers. It does the job just fine with more than enough overhead.
I have it running on 4gb of ram. No problems!
Try Nextcloud Memories.
Does that run on top of next cloud or can I run it independently of next cloud?
It's a Nextcloud app.
The only problem is, my internet's upload speed is slow as hell.
Self hosted doesn't necessarily mean hosted at home. Some of my stuff is for example hosted in a French datacenter for redundancy. At one point it was my only server space since hosting at home wasn't feasible at that time.
This is the way.
Check out Immich Kiosk as an example for image frames.
Because of course it won't
The enshittification must flow.
I'm still salty about them discontinuing synchronization between Google photos and Google drive years ago. Such an unnecessary and irritating move. Before that it was getting rid of the picassa desktop app which was actually quite a good photo library manager. The enshitification marches on.
I was still using Picassa desktop up until about a year ago. I only stopped because the software doesn’t support HEIC.
Damn. I miss Picasa. It was a powerful tool too.
Sounds like another reason to keep dumping google crap
You shouldn't be trusting google to store your photos anyways.
Or any third party, really..
Well, you are going to have to trust someone to store your offsite backup unless you can afford a second house somewhere. It should be a backup service where you can encrypt the data before uploading it though.
You can trust your own relatives or friends though - as long as you encrypt the drive you give them. Doesn't have to be a service.
Immich FTW
So I know that it has a API, but do 3rd party digital photo frames support it?
I just have an old tablet and I access Immich locally via browser and play a shuffled slideshow in full screen.
I mean you could put a stand on an old tablet. Personally I just put it on the TV.
To be clear, users can still manually share Google Photos pics with connected frames.
It's shitty that they removed apps ability to see all photos when authorized, though.
Fucking Google.