The photo frame
How to build an album, point a screen's photo frame at it, control how photos are cropped and dimmed, and turn one into a full-bleed background for the rest of a scene.
What it does
The photo frame cycles through the photographs in one of your albums. It fades between them, asks for a size the panel can actually use rather than the full original, and keeps going indefinitely.
It shows nothing until you choose an album. There is no stock imagery behind it and no sample album — a screen in somebody's home quietly fetching pictures from a third party is not something Mirra will do, and a broken stock image reads as "my photos are broken" rather than "you have not picked an album yet". So an unset frame says what to do instead.
The photo frame arrives with no card behind it. That is the right default for a picture, and it is what makes the background trick further down work without changing anything else.
Making an album
Albums live under Integrations, in the "Always available" list, because the photo frame is core — nothing has to be turned on for it. The page is headed "Photo frame — albums".
Open Integrations and find Photo frame
It is in the "Always available" panel below the integration cards. The link beside it reads "Manage" once you have an album, and "Create a photo album first" until then.
Press New album
You are asked for a name. Name it for what is in it — the tiles show four of the newest photographs each, which is enough to tell the holiday album from the children's one without opening either.
Click the album tile, then Upload photos
You can select several files at once. JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF are accepted, up to 15 MB each.
Check what arrived
Files that are too large or of the wrong type are skipped rather than rejecting the whole upload, and the page does not tell you which ones were dropped. The count on the tile is the honest answer for how many made it.
Delete album removes the album and every photograph in it from storage as well as from the list. You are asked to confirm, and the confirmation names the album and the number of photos, but there is no undo and no recycle bin.
Pointing a screen at it
The album is household-wide; the choice of which album a frame shows belongs to the widget, so two screens can show two different albums, and two scenes on one screen can as well.
Open the screen and the scene you want
From Screens, choose the screen, then the scene.
Add widget, then + Photo frame
It is under "Photos & art". It arrives seven columns wide and four rows tall.
Click it, and choose an album
The Album field lists every album with its photo count beside it. Until you pick one, the panel says so in amber: "Pick an album or this frame stays empty."
Press Save & push
The screen picks the change up within about a second.
Every setting on the widget
Five fields, and three of them are about how the picture meets the edges of its box.
Dim and vignette are plain number boxes, so nothing stops you typing 200. The screen clamps it. If a setting appears to stop having an effect, you have probably gone past its ceiling.
How it cycles
Photographs play in the order they were uploaded, oldest first, and then start again. There is no shuffle and no way to reorder within an album — if you want a different order, that is what a second album is for.
The next photograph is loaded behind the current one before the change, so the crossfade has something to fade to rather than a blank. Mirra asks the server for the smallest rendered width that still covers the panel — 320, 640, 1280 or 1920 pixels — rather than the original, because a six-megapixel photo on a 1080p screen is three times the pixels needed and the crossfade keeps two of them decoded at once.
- The order is upload order, oldest first. The albums page lists photos newest first, so the two read in opposite directions — that is the page being useful, not the widget being wrong.
- If your screen has camera gestures switched on, waving moves the frame on or back. Gestures are off by default and are set per screen.
- A wave does not restart the timer, so the next automatic change still arrives when it was going to.
- Waving backwards stops at the first photograph shown since the screen loaded rather than wrapping around to the end.
The full-bleed background
This is the arrangement most people are actually after: a photograph filling the whole screen with the clock, the date and the agenda floating on top of it. Mirra allows widgets to overlap precisely so this is possible.
The "Fill screen" button does the two fiddly parts in one press — it stretches the widget to the full grid and moves it to the Background layer, so everything else stays in front of it instead of disappearing underneath.
Select the photo frame and press Fill screen
It becomes twelve columns wide and the full height of the grid, and its Layer changes to Background.
Raise the dim a little
Somewhere around 30 to 50 is usually enough for white text to hold its own against a bright photograph. Add a vignette if the edges look cut off rather than faded.
Set the overlaid widgets' Surface to None
Under Appearance. A card behind a clock that is sitting on a photograph looks like a sticker; "None (transparent)" is what you want. The clock, date and weather already default to this.
Tick "Text shadow (helps over photos)"
Also under Appearance, on each overlaid widget. It is the difference between legible and nearly legible when a pale sky drifts under white type.
Move anything that must stay readable to Front
The Layer control has three positions — Background, Normal and Front (overlay). Front is for the one or two things that must never be covered.
Opacity and Size also live under Appearance, and both help here — dropping an overlaid agenda to around 80 per cent opacity lets the photograph read through it without losing the text.
When photos change
Uploading to an album that a wall is currently showing updates that wall within about a second. Deleting a photo does the same, and the delete is applied to the record before the screens are told, so a screen that reacts immediately reads the album as it now is rather than racing the deletion it was just told about.
Behind that there is a five-minute check, which exists only for a screen whose live connection to Mirra is down. It is a backstop, not the mechanism. If a change takes five minutes to appear, the interesting fact is not the photograph — it is that the screen is offline.
When the frame is empty
A blank frame always says why, in small text in the middle of the box. The four messages mean four different things and only one of them is a fault.
- "Choose an album in this widget's settings" — no album has been picked. Open the widget in the scene editor.
- "That album has no photos in it yet" — the album exists and is empty. Upload something to it.
- "Couldn't load photos — check this screen's connection" — the screen could not reach Mirra. Everything else on the screen is probably stale too.
- Nothing at all, briefly — it is still loading. It will settle into one of the above or into a photograph.
Related
- Every widget there isThe complete list of widgets Mirra ships with, grouped the way the scene editor groups them, with what each one shows and what it needs before it will show anything.
- The scene editorThe scene editor is where you arrange a screen's widgets on a twelve-column grid, watch the real widgets render behind them, and push the result to the wall.
- Widget appearanceEvery widget carries its own appearance settings — the layer it sits on, the surface behind it, how its contents are aligned, how large and how solid — and these are what make overlays possible.
- The art frameHow the art widget turns a screen into a picture frame — collections of your own, our curated catalogue, framing and mats, and what a household actually chooses to hang on the wall.
- A screen is blank or showing old informationHow to tell a screen that has lost its connection from one that is doing exactly what its schedule and scenes tell it to, and what to check in which order.