Bringing the digital photo frame into an even more modern age than the modern age it already resides in, Sean Tracey uses image recognition and social media to update his mother on the day-to-day happenings of her grandkids.

Sharing social media content

“Like every grandmother, my mum dotes on her grandchildren (the daughter and son of my sister, Grace and Freddie),” Sean explains in his tutorial for the project, “but they don’t live nearby, so she doesn’t get to see them as much as she might like.”

Sean tells of his mother’s lack of interest in social media platforms (they’re too complex), and of the anxiety he feels whenever she picks up his phone to catch up on the latest images of Grace and Freddie.

So I thought: “I know! Why don’t I make my mum a picture frame that filters my Instagram feed to show only pictures of my niece and nephew!”

Genius!

Image recognition and Instagram

Sean’s Instaframe project uses a Watson Visual Recognition model to recognise photos of his niece and nephew posted to his Instagram account, all via a Chrome extension. Then, via a series of smaller functions, these images are saved to a folder and displayed on a screen connected to a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Sean has written up a full rundown of the build process on his website.

Photos and Pi

Do you like photos and Raspberry Pi? Then check out these other photo-focused Pi projects that we’re sure you’ll love (because they’re awesome) and will want to make yourself (because they’re awesome).

FlipFrame

FlipFrame, the rotating picture frame, rotates according to the orientation of the image on display.

Upstagram

This tiny homage to the house from Up! takes bird’s-eye view photographs of Paris and uploads them to Instagram as it goes.

Pi-powered DSLR shutter

Adrian Bevan hacked his Raspberry Pi to act as a motion-activated shutter remote for his digital SLR — aka NatureBytes on steroids.