Hi, my siblings suggested that a present for our grandparents (younger silent generation) could be a digital picture frame that all the grandchildren could remotely upload pictures to. What I want to ask is if there are any that have an open protocol or open source alternate firmware that could be flashed to them, or otherwise can be recovered and used if the tech company making them goes out of business or just decides to stop supporting them.
So far, anything stable and user friendly enough for old people rules out trying to replicate an open source project from Hackaday, github, etc. I found and everything commercial I found seems to risk being a piece of e-waste in 6 months if the company goes out of business or decides that product isn’t making enough money to keep supporting the app.
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I know it goes against everything everyone on lemmy says, but a Google Home Hub. You pick which Google Photos albums you want to have displayed on the screen, and any time you add any pictures to the album, they’re immediately in the rotation. Bonus points, once you’ve set it up, everything can be done remotely. It also has a physical mic-off switch.
I’m not trusting google enough to believe the switch actually does anything.
We’ve had two of these over the years… One company failed and had to switch. For ease of use / reliability I didn’t try to build a DIY solution.
We are currently using Nixplay frames. We have one and both our parents were gifted one.
There’s an email address you can email pictures to for them to show up on everyone’s frames.
They have quite a few settings, Auto on during certain hours, groups etc…
They’ve been very solid for a number of years now.
Downside is they’re pretty expensive. Amazon sells them, and they do go on sale occasionally.
We’ve been using Nixplay since 2014.
P.S “Frame Album” was the first one, and after they failed the hack was called framechannel. There was some dns trickery you had to do to connect to a fake “mother ship” . Cannot remember what happened with that, but we switched to Nixplay devices .
