Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays have never been as good as Google’s Nest Hub or a dedicated digital photo frame at doing one thing well: displaying your photos. That’s because Amazon clutters the screen with questionably useful information and alternates your pretty photos with suggestions for the latest Alexa skill you might want to try, an egg salad recipe, or spicy news about a tomato shaped like a duck.
But starting August 5, you can now command your Echo Show to show you only your photos and nothing else for three whole hours.
Photo Frame mode hides all ads, calendars, and weather notifications to turn it into a photo-only slideshow
Amazon’s Digital Photo Frame feature, previously only available on the Echo Show 15, is now on all Echo smart displays in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.
Just say “Alexa, start Photo Frame” and you’ll have a seamless three-hour slideshow featuring your Amazon Photos, Facebook photos, or stock image collection. (If you want to know how to get your photos to appear in these albums, read my article on how to use your Echo Show as a digital photo frame.)
Most importantly, this new photo frame mode hides all ads and calendar and weather notifications to turn it into a photo-only slideshow. The only visible text is a small date in the lower right corner showing when the photo was taken and which album it is from.
Photo Frame mode removes the digital clock and time and only includes a date line for the image. Image: Amazon
You can choose which albums Photo Frame mode uses in the Echo Show device settings in the Alexa app. Scroll down to Photo Display and choose from Daily Memories, This Day, Favorites, Recent, and other options that pull from your Amazon Photos account. You can also link a Facebook account here or upload images from your smartphone or tablet.
Photo Frame makes it easy to start a slideshow without having to remember a specific album name and without seeing the same images repeated over and over again. It’s also a nicer way to see your photos displayed on the Echo Show than on the standard home screen, where a big clock takes up a quarter of the picture and you still get the occasional ad for an Alexa service interrupting the flow; no matter how many of the 30+ home screen content choices you have turned off in your device settings.
The only real frustration now is why it will only do this for three hours before returning to the information overload of the standard home screen. Just give us the option to leave it always on.
Correction August 11, 7:52 PM ET: Due to incorrect information provided by Amazon, a previous version of this article stated that the Photo Frame feature would now be available on Fire TV. It’s only available on Echo Show devices. Also, the feature is available in Germany, not Denmark.
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