New Amazon feature turns Echo Show into a better digital photo frame

Amazon Echo Show smart screens It’s never been as good as Google Nest Hub or custom digital photo frame To do something good: display your photos. That’s because Amazon fills your screen with questionable useful information and exchanges your sweet photos with suggestions for the latest Alexa skill you might want to try, an egg salad recipe, or news feeds about duck shaped tomato.

But starting August 5th, you can now command your Echo Show to only show you your photos and nothing else for a full three hours.

Amazon’s Digital Photo Frame feature, which was previously only available on Echo Show 15, Now on all Echo smart displays in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.

Just say “Alexa, start Photo Frame,” and you’ll get a three-hour clutter-free slideshow featuring Amazon photos, Facebook photos, or a stack of stored photos. (If you want to know how your photos appear in these albums, read my article on How to use Echo Show as a digital photo frame.)

Crucially, the new Photo Frame mode hides all ads, calendar, and weather notifications into just a photo slideshow. The only text visible is a small date line in the lower right showing when the photo was taken and which album it belongs to.

You can choose which albums Photo Frame mode uses in the device settings for the Echo Show in the Alexa app. Scroll down to View Photos and choose from Daily Memories, This Day, Favorites, Recent, and other options pulled from your Amazon Photos account. You can also link your Facebook account here or upload photos from your smartphone or tablet.

Photo Frame makes it easy to start a slideshow without having to remember the name of a specific album and without seeing the same photos over and over again. It’s also a better way to see your photos displayed on the Echo Show than on the standard home screen, where the large clock takes up a quarter of the image, and you can still get an occasional Alexa ad that cuts the flow; No matter how many Home screen content options are over 30, you can toggle them off in the device settings.

The only real frustration now is why he only did this for three hours before returning to information overload on the standard home screen. Just let us have the option to leave it permanently.

Correction on August 11th at 7:52 PM ET: Due to incorrect information provided by Amazon, a previous version of this article stated that the Photo Frame feature will now be available on Fire TV devices. It is only available on Echo Show devices. Additionally, the feature is available in Germany but not Denmark.