A guide
How to use your Apple TV as a picture frame
The TV is the biggest screen in most homes, and most of the day it's a black rectangle. With an Apple TV and the right app it can show a painting or one of your own photos instead, full screen and for as long as you like. Set up well, it looks like a picture on the wall rather than a TV someone left on.
What you need
- An Apple TV (Apple TV HD or Apple TV 4K, on tvOS 17 or later).
- An app that shows pictures. Salon shows paintings and the photos you've marked as favourites. The built-in screen saver shows photos only.
- A few minutes in your TV's picture settings.
Paintings and photos with Salon
I made Salon to turn an Apple TV into a picture frame. You can choose from more than 1,100 paintings, prints, maps and photographs, each cropped by hand to fill the screen in 4K, or from the photos you've marked as favourites in iCloud Photos. Pick one and it stays, or let Salon move through your favourites on a timer.
- On the Apple TV, open the App Store and search for Salon Museum Art.
- Open Salon and press the centre of the clickpad to browse. Choose a picture, then Display on Frame.
- For your own photos, tap the heart on them in the Photos app on your iPhone, then open Your Photos in Salon. More on showing iCloud photos.
- In Salon's settings, choose a mat and a clock, and keep Keep Screen Awake on so the screen saver doesn't take over.
Make it look like a frame, not a TV
- Add a mat. A bevel-cut mat around the picture makes it read as a print. Salon has five board colours and three widths.
- Turn the brightness down. A TV at full brightness glows like a window. Lower it until the picture is about as bright as the wall around it. Salon's Low Light look and its Dim the Screen setting help with this from inside the app.
- Choose pictures the shape of the screen. A TV is 16:9. Landscapes and harbour scenes fill it, while tall portraits leave black bars or lose their top and bottom. Every picture in Salon is already cropped to fit.
- Hide the black edge. Magnetic or clip-on bezels, sold for most TV sizes, make the TV's edge look like a picture frame.
Leaving it on
A TV showing a picture uses power, so set the TV's own sleep timer or energy-saving mode for the hours nobody is home. On an OLED TV, a still picture left for many hours can leave a faint trace, so let the picture change now and then. Salon also moves the picture a pixel at a time, too slowly to see, to help prevent it.
Is it better than a digital photo frame?
A digital photo frame is made for the job and can sit anywhere, but it's small. If you already have a TV and an Apple TV, you get a far bigger picture for the price of an app, with paintings as well as your own photos.
More: how to display art on your TV and paintings as your Apple TV screen saver.
An Apple TV app. On your Apple TV, open the App Store and search for Salon Museum Art. It is listed as Salon: Museum Art Frame.