How to put your own custom art on The Frame

Photographs are one thing. Custom art is another: a piece you made, commissioned, bought as a digital download, or built out of type and colour because you wanted something specific over the sofa. The Frame handles all of it, and the difference between custom art that looks designed and custom art that looks like a screensaver is decided before you upload anything.

Start the canvas at the right size

Set the document to 3840 by 2160 pixels at 72 ppi, sRGB, and design inside it.

The ppi number is irrelevant to a screen and people argue about it anyway: what the TV reads is the pixel count. 72, 96 and 300 ppi all produce an identical file at 3840 by 2160. Where ppi matters is if you also intend to print the piece, in which case work larger and export a screen copy.

Starting at the final size rather than resizing at the end is the whole trick. It means your type is sized against the real canvas, your margins are the real margins, and nothing gets resampled on the way out. The reasons the exact number matters are in the size and format guide.

Where to set it:

Photoshop and Photopea: File, New, Width 3840, Height 2160, Pixels, colour mode RGB, profile sRGB.
Affinity Designer and Photo: New Document, Type Web, custom 3840 by 2160.
Figma: a frame at 3840 by 2160, export at 1x.
Canva: Custom size, 3840 by 2160 px. Check the export dialog is not downscaling to 1080p, which its default share sizes do.
Procreate: custom canvas 3840 by 2160. Watch the layer limit, which drops as canvas size rises on older iPads.
Illustrator or any vector tool: artboard 3840 by 2160, export PNG or JPEG at 1x, not at the artboard's print size.

Design for a screen on a wall, not a screen on a desk

A Frame is viewed from three or four metres, in a lit room, at a size no monitor reaches, and often out of the corner of somebody's eye. That changes what works.

Big, few elements. One subject, generous space. Detail that rewards leaning in is wasted; detail that fights for attention is noise.
Type must be large. Anything under about 60 pixels tall on a 3840 canvas is unreadable across a room. If you would not set it at that size on a poster, do not set it here.
Watch the corners. Some Frame bezels and most physical magnetic frames overlap a few pixels of the panel edge. Keep anything essential inside a margin of about 40 pixels.
Mid tones read best. Art Mode dims the panel automatically according to the room, so a piece built out of near blacks turns into a dark rectangle in daylight, and a piece built out of near whites glows like a lightbox at night.
Flat colour fields need quality. Gradients and large single colour areas are exactly where JPEG compression shows banding. Export at quality 90 or higher for this kind of work.

Digital downloads you bought

There is a large market of Frame art sold as instant downloads. Most of it arrives already at 3840 by 2160, and some of it does not.

Before uploading anything you bought, check the pixel dimensions of the file. A seller who ships 1920 by 1080, or a 3:2 file with "fits Frame TV" in the listing, has left you a job to do: crop and resize as if it were your own photograph. Ask for a refund if a listing claimed 4K and did not deliver it.

Watch the licence too. Most digital art downloads are licensed for personal display, which covers your living room. Displaying the same file in a shop, a restaurant or an office lobby usually is not covered, and that is worth two minutes of reading before it goes on a wall the public sees.

Getting it onto the TV

Once the file is right, any of the three upload routes will take it. For custom art specifically, avoid the phone route where you can: SmartThings re-encodes what it sends, and re-encoding a piece with flat colour and hard edges is where you notice it most.

Sending from a computer keeps the file you exported. TV Art Manager does that: it holds your pieces in named collections on your disk, prepares each one to the exact panel size, and puts it on the TV edge to edge with the matte disabled. If you make art in batches, Pro sends a whole collection in one go and can keep the TV mirroring a folder, so the wall changes when the folder does.

A series is better than a piece

The mistake most people make with custom art is making one beautiful thing and leaving it up for six months, at which point nobody in the house can see it any more.

Make four or five pieces that share a palette and a logic, put them all on the TV, and let it rotate them daily. A set that changes stays visible in a way that a single piece never does, and building variations is far less work than starting again.