These days we all use the cameras on our phones to document our life or special events, which is great. It allows us to go back and relive moments or share with friends and family.
But it also have big drawback… How many of us actually go back on a regular basis to look at the photos? How many of us print them?
If you’re like me, you’re not likely to do that, which is how this project got started.
There are a lot of photo frames out there, but very few big ones and practically none which doesn’t require constant updating by the owner to show something interesting. So in the end you still don’t see the pictures you took, only the ones when you remember to update your frame.
This project aims to solve that. By pairing any display you want with a RaspberryPi3 and a Google Photos account, you get a mostly fire-and-forget solution.
The RPi3 will automatically pull interesting pictures from your Google Photos account based on the search query/queries you define (which can be very broad) and show them on the screen.
No middleman (like a 3rd party service to upload photos to), no SD card to update, just a one time setup and off you go.
Thanks to the AI which classifies your images uploaded to Google Photos, you can simply add keywords such as “Christmas”, “Thanksgiving”, “Henric Andersson”, “cats”, etc… and the frame will always be pulling down and showing the latest photos based on these queries.
How neat is that?
tl;dr
Photoframe uses your Raspberry Pi 3 and a spare monitor to create a fire-and-forget digital photo frame on the cheap. By relying on Google Photos and the image recognition which powers the search engine, you’ll get curated photos with little or no effort.