Turning old unused iPads into photo frames

By Tim on May 18, 2025 6 min read.

I’ve always liked having a dynamic photo frame at home which shows off a selection of recent photos.

We take a lot of photos these days and it feels like showing them off in a nice photo frame is a nice way to enjoy them.

I’ve had various flavours of this over the years. Sadly the pace at which technology changes is often the reason why a perfectly good working solution stops working! And that’s the reason for this post.

I suspect that most people who want to do this buy a custom made photo frame. And either feed it with a USB stick of photos and are happy to manually update them every now and again. Or are happy to pay a subscription for a service to integrate with their online photos.

My requirements are:

Recent photos are automatically displayed on the photo frame shortly after taking
Photos could be a mixture of “old special photos” and more recently taken ones
No subsc...