Amazon Echo Show smart displays have never done one thing as well as Google’s Nest Hub or dedicated digital photo frames: show off your photos. That’s because Amazon clutters the screen with dubiously useful information and alternates your pretty pictures with suggestions for the latest Alexa skill you might want to try, a recipe for egg salad, or a news tidbit about a tomato shaped like a duck.
But starting August 5th, you can now command the Echo Show to show only your photos and nothing else for a full three hours.
Amazon’s digital photo frame feature, previously only available on the Echo Show 15, is now available on all Echo smart displays in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain , and Australia.
Just say “Alexa, start the frame” and you’ll get a neat three-hour slideshow of your Amazon photos, Facebook photos, or a collection of stock photos. (If you want to know how to get your photos to appear in these albums, read my article on how to use the Echo Show as a digital photo frame.)
Crucial, This new photo frame mode hides all ads and calendar and weather notifications into a photo-only slideshow. The only visible text is the small date line in the lower right corner, showing when the photo was taken and which album the photo came from.
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Image: Amazon
The photo frame makes it easy to start a slideshow without having to remember specific album title and not seeing the same image repeated over and over. It’s also a better way to view photos on the Echo Show than the standard home screen, where a large clock takes up a quarter of the picture, and you’ll still see the occasional Alexa service interrupting traffic ads; no matter how many of the 30+ home screen content options you have turned off in your device settings.
Now the only real frustration is why it only happened three hours ago Doing so restores the information overload to the standard home screen. Gives us the option to keep it on forever.
Correction Aug 11 at 7:52pm ET:
Due to incorrect information provided by Amazon, a previous version of this article stated that the Picture Frames feature is now available on Fire TV. It’s only on Echo Show devices. Also, the feature is available in Germany instead of Denmark.
