Amazon Echo Show smart displays have never been better than Google’s Nest Hub or a dedicated one Digital photo frame to do one thing right: show your photos. This is because Amazon clutters the screen with questionably useful information, interspersing your pretty photos with suggestions for the latest Alexa skill you might want to try, an egg salad recipe, or a news story about a tomato in the shape of a duck.
But starting August 5, you can now instruct your Echo Show to show you only your photos and nothing else for 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, launch Photo 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 learn how to make your photos appear in these albums, read my article on using your Echo Show as a digital photo frame.)
Crucially, this new Photo Frame mode hides all ads and calendar and weather notifications to become a photo-only slideshow. The only visible text is a small date line at the bottom right that shows when the photo was taken and which album it came from.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23939255/EchoShow_10_LifeStyle_glacier.jpg)
You can choose which albums Photo Frame mode uses in the device settings for the Echo Show in the Alexa app. Scroll down to Photos View and choose from Daily Reminders, This Day, Favorites, Recent, and other options pulled from your Amazon Photos account. You can also link a Facebook account here or upload images from your smartphone or tablet.
Photo Frame makes it easy to start a slideshow without having to remember a specific album name and without repeating the same images over and over. It’s also a nicer way to see your photos on an Echo Show than on the standard home screen, where a large clock takes up a quarter of the photo, and you’ll still get the occasional ad for an Alexa service that interrupts the power; it doesn’t matter how many of the more than 30 choices for content on the home screen you disable in the device’s settings.
The only real frustration now is why it only does this for three hours before returning to the information overload of the default home screen. Just let us have the option to leave it on permanently.
Correction Aug 11 7:52 PM ET: Due to incorrect information from Amazon, an earlier version of this article stated that the Photo Frame feature would now be available on Fire TVs. It’s only on Echo Show devices. In addition, the feature is available in Germany and not in Denmark.
