How to turn your living room TV into a family photo frame

What you actually need

You need three things, and you almost certainly have all of them already. First, a Smart TV — Samsung, LG, or any Android TV box like a Sony, Hisense, TCL, or Nvidia Shield. If you bought your TV any time in the last seven or eight years, it is a Smart TV and it has an app store built in. Second, a Google account with your photos in Google Photos. If you have ever taken a photo on an Android phone and let it back up, your photos are already there. Most iPhone users have them too — you would have downloaded the Google Photos app at some point. Third, a few minutes of quiet on a Saturday morning. That is it. Nothing to buy, no cables to plug in, no technician to call, no extra device to find space for. The TV does the work.

Three steps to set it up

Step one. Open your TV's app store — on a Samsung the button on the remote takes you there, on LG it is the Apps row on the home screen, on an Android TV it is Google Play. Search for Easy Photo Player and install it. The icon is a small navy square with a picture inside it. Step two. Open the app on the TV. It will show you a six-character code on the screen, like A4F-3HK. Take your phone or computer, go to easyphotoplayer.com on the web browser, sign in with the Google account that holds your photos, and type in that code. The TV will tell you it is connected. This is the only technical part of the whole thing, and it takes under a minute. Step three. On the same phone or computer, you will see a button to pick your photos. Google's own picker opens. Tap or click photos one by one to add them, or open an album and tap Select All. When you are happy, click Done. The TV starts showing the photos within a few seconds. That is the entire setup. The next time you want to change which photos play, you do step three again — there is no step one or two to repeat.

What it looks like once it is running

When the TV is on, it shows one photo, then another, then another, with a gentle fade between each one. The photos are at full resolution — if you took them on a recent phone, they fill the whole screen. Mixed orientations work fine: a vertical phone photo does not get stretched, and a horizontal photo from a real camera looks the way it should. If you have included a video in your selection, the video plays in line with the photos. The pace is unhurried — no flashy zooms, no music playing, no captions across the screen. It is just your photos, on the TV, the way a real photo frame would look if it could be the size of your living room wall. People sit in the kitchen having coffee and notice a photo of their grandchildren they had not thought about in two years. That is the moment the app is built for.

Common worries answered

A few questions come up over and over, so here are the honest answers. I am not good with technology — there is nothing to maintain. Once it is set up, you do not open the app on the TV again. You do not update anything, you do not troubleshoot anything. The TV just plays the photos. Are my photos safe — your photos stay where they are, in your own Google account. The app does not copy your photos onto our servers, does not share them with anyone, and does not see any photos you did not pick. We cannot browse your library; we can only show on your TV the specific items you chose. What if I want to change the photos later — open the website on your phone, click the same button you clicked the first time, change your selection, click Done. Thirty seconds. Will my children or grandchildren be able to set this up for me — yes, easily. They can install the app on the TV and link it from your phone in five minutes the next time they visit. Does it cost something — the free plan shows ten photos a day on one TV, no credit card needed. If you would like more views per day or more than one TV (the kitchen and the living room, for instance), there is a small monthly subscription, but most people start with the free plan and never need anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions