digital photo frame
This is my solution to the enormous pile of photographs that I have accumulated without any viable and cost effective way of displaying them.
The idea is not a new one, and there are commercially available products, but I believe my solution has far greater flexibility at a tiny fraction of the cost.
About two years ago I set out on the difficult road of moving away from “taking snaps” to producing more thoughtful, better composed photographs. During this time I have migrated from a Minolta Dynax 505si Super to a Minolta Dynax 9, and latterly to a Canon EOS-10D. My skills are slowly improving, but so is my pile of “more credible” photographs. Some of these photographs I am quite proud of and would like to display in my house, but living in a two-up-two-down my wall space is somewhat limited.
It didn’t take much brain power to realise that what I needed was a photo frame where I could display a number of my pictures in a slide show. After a quick scour of the Internet I found a number of “digital photo frames”, but was shocked by the price and limited ability of most. The cheapest I found had a small 5.6” screen with a 320x240 pixel resolution and that cost over £200. Others were £900+ and still weren’t much better. With my funds being limited, so were my options. I set out to devise my own solution...
There were no prizes for concluding a suitable starting point would be a laptop computer. They have nice big screens, are viewable from a wide range of angles and are small in size. A search of the online auction website eBay returned a pleasing number of possibilities. The laptop only needed to display a few pictures – not exactly a challenge to the computers of recent years. I eventually targeted my attentions towards an old IBM Thinkpad with a 12.4” 800x600 64k colour TFT LCD screen. I managed to bag it for £80 including postage! A few days later my new (old) laptop arrived.
Next was the question of operating system. Again, these can be expensive. However, having upgraded my own PC several times I had a old Windows 98 license lying around unused. On it went...
Now I needed some way of displaying the pictures I want to put on it. After another quick search of the Internet I found a good piece of slideshow software. It could just be ‘pointed’ at a directory and would continually cycle through any pictures it found in there, resizing them and adding in some clever transitional effects as it went. Furthermore it was, to coin a phrase, as "cheap-as-chips!"
I now had a laptop with a slideshow and a pleasing 7Gb+ of free disk space. At 800x600 pixels that’s room for a lot of pictures! The next question was how to get my pictures onto my new laptop. Whilst sitting on my desk using the laptop’s disk drive is easy enough, but not when it’s hanging on the wall. I decided the best solution was to connect the laptop to my main computer via a network. eBay again came to the rescue and I secured a PCMCIA network card suitable for use in a laptop for £10 including P&P.
At last I was at the stage where I was ready to put the laptop in my lounge. Simply shoving it on a shelf, or gluing it to the magnolia covered walls was not going to do the job. I tootled off to my local friendly DIY store and picked up a glorified clip-frame with a black surround for about £4. I carefully measured the laptop screen and cut a marginally smaller hole in the back-board of my clip-frame and a corresponding hole in some black mount-board. I then made a frame out of some 3” x 1” wood, making an open box on the back of the frame in which I could mount the laptop. I painted the whole of the frame a matt black so that it would blend-in once on the wall. I also cut a side hole as a vent which I tidied up with a fifty pence fan grille. Three heavy duty hooks were added for hanging the frame, plus four small rubber feet to stop the frame directly touching my wall.
Finally came the only tricky bit of the whole exercise – mounting the laptop. I carefully dismantled the case of the laptop until the point that I had enough slack in the monitor cables that I could completely fold the screen back against the laptop body. Having achieved this I then mounted the screen over the opening in my clip frame and fixed the main body of the laptop to two metal battens, which I then also fixed into the frame. The only remaining tasks were to mount the power supply in the case and to provide sockets for the network and power connectors (for neatness). Job done… My cheap laptop had turned into a fully functioning digital photo frame!
I’m very pleased with the results and it works extremely well. It sits on the wall in my lounge gently rolling through some of my better pictures and is great for inspiring me to go out and to continue to try to improve my photography, especially when the weather is less than hospitable!
I very much doubt that this is a new idea, but it is a relatively easy solution to something for which I am sure there are others with the same conundrum. For just over £100 and a day of DIY I now have a way of displaying thousands of pictures in a way that blends in subtly with the rest of my house.
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The photo frame viewed
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The rear view of the
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The components labelled on the "rear view" (above) are:
1. Laptop computer
2. Power supply unit
3. PCMCIA network card
4. RJ45 Network connector
5. Mains connector
6. Heavy duty hooks
7. Rubber feet
8. Metal securing bracket
9. Vent hole
Addendum [19/09/03]
The DigiFrame has now gone wireless! The replacement of the PCMCIA LAN card with a PCMCIA WLAN card has now enabled the DigiFrame to go wireless. This means that the photographs can be updated without the need for any hard wiring between the frame and the network. The only external connection the frame requires is mains power!
If you wish to know more about this project please contact me.