How to turn your iPad into a digital photo frame

Reinvent your old iPad by turning it into a digital photo frame

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Quick steps

How to turn your iPad into a digital photo frame

Whether you’re looking to reinvent an old tablet or add a string to the bow of current one, you may be wondering how to turn your iPad into a digital photo. Luckily, it’s fairly straightforward – and our guide’s here to show you the two best ways of going about it.

A digital photo frame is great way to bring photos into your home without accruing even more physical clutter. Unfortunately, cheap ones typically have poor displays. And thebest digital photo framesaren’t always cheap. But if you do have an older iPad lying around, it can be turned into a brilliant photo frame.

You may find that using a current-gen iPad for this is slight overkill or interrupts your daily use of the tablet. But if you tend to use your iPad in fits and starts, it’s a fine way to get more use of it – and it’s a great way to give older tech a new lease of life.

There are two recommended methods here. The first requires no extra software, just the features baked into your iPad’s software. In the second, we’ll also look at why you might want to use one of the handful of decent iPad photo frame apps, and the extra features they provide.

How to turn your iPad into a digital photo frame: method one (Photos app)

While, photo frames are generally designed to stay backlit all day, tablets are more like phones, with screens that go to sleep after a while if there’s no user interaction.

You control this in Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-lock. Set Auto-lock to Never and the screen will not automatically dim. This also, of course, means you’ll want to plug your iPad into a power source, or it will power off after the usual iPad 10-hour battery runs dry. Here are the rest of the steps needed to get your iPad behaving like a digital photo frame.

Tools and requirements (method one)

Step-by-step instructions

How to turn your iPad into a digital photo frame: method two (LiveFrame app)

An iPad makes a good digital photo frame with the Photos app alone, but you may also want to try a third-party app that adds some secondary features. For example, LiveFrame lets you make your iPad photo frame display the time and date if you like. Photos can also be displayed for as much as 30 minutes before shifting.

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LiveFrame is free to download and try, but you’ll see a pop up after five minutes of use, after which you can either buy the app ($4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99) or watch an ad for a further five minutes of use.

Most of the earlier points in this guide still apply to this method. You want to setup the screen time-out, create an album in Photos and – if you want to use it – enable Guided Access. However, you’ll obviously then want to download and run LiveFrame.

Tools and requirements (method two)

Step-by-step instructions

Next steps

Photo frames are all about the visual, so we ideally want the iPad to look less like a tablet, and more like a photo frame.

The affordable and sensible route is just to get a stand that holds your iPad at a photo frame-like angle. You’ll find these onAmazongoing cheap from companies like Ugreen, Topways and Lamicall.

A small company called EventFrame goes a lot further, producing ‘handmade’ solid oak in nine different colors/stains. The iPad is secured at the back using a thick bungee cord, meaning the tablet isn’t locked behind a backing plate – as a picture usually is in a frame.

EventFrame sells its wares onEtsy, where it has great reviews, and on itswebsite. The only issue is these frames don’t come cheap, which may ruin the appeal if you’re looking to save money by repurposing an old iPad.

You should also consider getting an extra-long, right-angle charge cable, which keeps the power cord close to the frame rather than making it curve out in goofy-looking fashion. Check which connector your iPad uses before ordering, though. All base-level iPads have Lightning connectors, while the latest mid-range and high-end ones use USB-C. If your iPad is a little older, it will use a Lightning port.

If your iPad is positively ancient, it may have a classic 30-pin connector. 30-pin right-angle charge cables are relatively rare, but if you are able to repurpose a tablet that old, you already earn double points for techy preservation.

Andrew is a freelance journalist and has been writing and editing for some of the UK’s top tech and lifestyle publications including TrustedReviews, Stuff, T3, TechRadar, Lifehacker and others.

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