How to change The Frame's art automatically every day
Setting up a slideshow or a daily rotation of your own artwork on Samsung The Frame, including what the built in slideshow does and does not do.
A picture that never changes stops being visible after about a fortnight. The whole argument for a television pretending to be a painting is that it can be a different painting tomorrow, and getting that working is the difference between a Frame you notice and a Frame you have furnished around.
There are three ways to make the art change, and they suit different things.
The TV's own slideshow
Every Frame has it built in, and for many people it is enough.
- Put the TV in Art Mode.
- Open the Art Mode menu, then Slideshow or Art Mode settings, then Slideshow.
- Turn it on and choose an interval. The options run from a few minutes to a day, depending on firmware.
- Choose the source: the Art Store favourites, your own My Photos album, or a specific album.
What it does well: it is free, it needs no other device, and it survives the TV being turned off and on.
What it does not do. The interval is a cycle timer, not a schedule, so you cannot say "change at 7 in the morning". It usually shuffles with no memory, so the same three images come up repeatedly while others go unseen for weeks. It rotates what is already on the TV, so new work still has to be uploaded by hand. And on several firmware versions it will happily mix your own photographs with Art Store pieces in a way you did not intend.
For a fixed set of pictures you rarely change, this is the right answer and there is no reason to add anything to it.
SmartThings routines
If you already run SmartThings, you can drive Art Mode from a routine: turn Art Mode on at a time, off at a time, react to somebody arriving home.
It is genuinely useful for controlling when the TV shows art at all, which matters more than people expect. Art Mode drawing a picture at three in the morning to an empty room is wasted panel hours and a small amount of electricity. A routine that puts the TV to sleep overnight and wakes it at breakfast is worth setting up whatever else you do.
What routines do not give you is control over which artwork is shown. Selecting a specific piece is not exposed as a routine action, so this is scheduling around the slideshow rather than replacing it.
A rotation driven from your PC
The third route is the local Art Mode interface, which lets a computer on the same network choose the artwork directly. That is what makes an actual schedule possible: a specific set, a specific time, a specific order.
TV Art Manager does it this way. You mark which of your collections are in the rotation, choose a time of day, and pick random or sequential order. Once a day at that time it puts the next piece on the TV. Random is no-repeat, so it works through the whole set before anything comes round again, which is the thing the TV's own shuffle gets wrong.
It also handles the part that makes a rotation sustainable rather than a chore:
- Sync uploads anything in the rotation that is not on the TV yet, skipping duplicates, so adding pictures to a folder is all it takes to add them to the wall.
- TV retention removes its own older uploads when the TV fills up, and only ever deletes files it uploaded itself and recorded. Samsung's catalogue art and anything you put on by USB or phone is never touched.
- The tray keeps it running quietly, and it can start with Windows, so the rotation happens without anyone opening anything.
Rotation, sync and tray operation are Pro features. The free version does the manual side, one image at a time, as often as you like.
Choosing an interval
Daily is the interval almost everyone settles on.
Faster than that and the wall becomes a slideshow, which reads as a screen rather than a picture, and the change catches your eye every time it happens. Slower than a week and you stop seeing the picture at all, which is the problem you were solving.
The one exception is a party or a room you are showing off, where a fifteen minute cycle is the point.
Prepare the set first
A rotation exposes every mistake in a collection. One badly cropped image is easy to ignore in a folder and glaring when it appears on a wall on a Tuesday morning.
Before turning rotation on: get every file to exactly 3840 by 2160 so nothing arrives with a border, using the size and format guide, and check the set holds together, because pieces that clash are far more obvious in sequence than in a grid.
Twenty to fifty images is the sweet spot. Enough that a piece is a surprise when it returns, few enough that they are all ones you actually chose.