How I turned my old Android tablet into a self-hosted photo display

Every tech enthusiast owns a closet full of old hardware that isn’t being used anymore. I’m much the same. Be it smartphones, old consoles, or other tech paraphernalia, this is usually tech that we aren’t quite ready to dispose of yet, but don’t have a use for either. In my case, it was a couple-of-years-old Android tablet that had become too slow for heavy multitasking and everyday use, but still possessed a gorgeous high-resolution screen. Rather than letting it sit until the battery failed, I decided to give it a second life as a dedicated, self-hosted photo display.

Going in, I didn’t expect much. My previous experience with commercial digital photo displays has been abysmal, to say the least, and some of the newer models are way too expensive for my tastes. However, as I quickly found out, the DIY route gives you a result that is better than any smart photo frame you can buy at a big-box store. By pairing this so-called obsolete hardware with a powerful tool called Immich Kiosk, I created a privacy-focused display that actually looks like a premium product. It has no ads, no subscriptions, and gives me total control over every aspect of the photo display experience. I love it.

If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store today, you will find a plethora of smart frames and displays from companies like Amazon, Google, and Aura. On the surface, they look like the perfect solution for the modern digital photography era. They have decent screens and promise to sync with your phone. Some, like the Aura, will even integrate with Google Photos, which is a big plus. But once you actually live with one, the inconsistencies in the user experience start to show up. The Amazon Echo Show, for example, has become an advertising billboard that happens to show a photo of your vacation every few minutes between suggested recipes and news alerts.

Dedicated frames like those from Nixplay or Aura are slightly better but often come with their own set of issues. Some require a monthly subscription just to unlock basic features, like being able to connect storage accounts. Others rely entirely on a proprietary cloud service that could vanish tomorrow if the company goes under. There is also the glaring issue of screen quality.

Even high-end digital frames often use mediocre, low-resolution LCD panels with poor viewing angles and disappointing contrast ratios. When you compare them to the vibrant OLED or high-density IPS displays found on tablets from five years ago, the retail frames look like cheap, disposable junk.

Before I could fix my hardware problem, I had to solve the software side. For the uninitiated, Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management solution that acts as a direct replacement for Google Photos or iCloud. It is fast, it is free, and it runs on your own hardware. Because I already had my entire library of over 250,000 photos mirrored on an Immich server in my study, I had the perfect foundation to build my photo display. While I still keep a copy of my smartphone photos on Google Photos, for this project, I didn’t want to upload my life to another third-party cloud just to see a slideshow.

The beauty of Immich is that it gives you total control over your metadata and your privacy. There are no algorithms scanning your faces to sell you products. There are no storage notifications urging you to pay a subscription fee every month for expanded storage. It is just your data, running on your hardware, with just the amount of storage you allocate to it. However, while the standard Immich mobile app is fantastic for browsing, it isn’t designed to be a passive photo frame. That functional gap is where the self-hosted Immich Kiosk project comes in.

Immich Kiosk is a lightweight, highly customizable web application designed specifically to turn any device with a browser into a professional-grade photo display. It connects to your Immich server via an API key and pulls your photos based on specific albums or criteria. It’s essentially the missing link between the folder of photos on your computer, server, or NAS drive, and the tablet you had discarded as e-waste that we’ll be turning into a fully connected photo display.

The project is hosted on GitHub and can be deployed as a Docker container, making it incredibly easy to manage if you already have a home server. The provided Compose file is basically all you need to get started, other than an API token from your Immich instance. Everything else is controlled via variables defined in the URL itself, and there’s plenty to choose from.

What makes Immich Kiosk special is the level of granularity it offers. You aren’t stuck with a basic fade transition. You can control the timing of the transition, the weather overlays, the image scaling, and even add a “Ken Burns” effect that brings static images to life. You can opt to include or exclude specific faces, show weather data, the time, and much more. It feels like a premium product because it is community-built by people who actually use it every day.

For this task, the tablet I pulled from my drawer was an old OnePlus tablet with a 120Hz display and excellent, vibrant color reproduction. When it was released, it was a fairly premium tablet costing around $500. In 2026, well, the monetary value isn’t all that much. But the goal here isn’t to extract the most value out of the product. It is to put what would otherwise languish in your gadget drawer to use. All that to say that the screen and general hardware here are leagues ahead of what you’d find on a $230 Google Nest Hub Max.

Setting it up was surprisingly straightforward. I deployed the Immich Kiosk container on my server and pointed the tablet’s browser to the local IP address. To make it feel like a real appliance rather than a tablet running a website, I used a kiosk app that locks the device into a single URL and prevents the screen from ever turning off. The result is a seamless experience. When I walk into my living room, the tablet is simply there, cycling through photos with sharpness, vividness, and clarity that puts my old dedicated photo frame to shame. I use Fully Kiosk Browser, and it even lets you configure the tablet to use the front-facing camera as a motion sensor. This means that the tablet only switches on when someone is around it.

Like I mentioned earlier, Immich Kiosk is infinitely customizable to meet your needs, and the real joy of this DIY approach is the customization. Commercial frames usually give you two or three options for how photos are displayed. With Immich Kiosk, I can create “smart” albums. For example, I have a specific album in Immich for “Favorites.” The kiosk is configured to only pull from that album, but, in addition, it also filters for photos taken on “this day” in previous years. Similar to what Google Photos offers. This creates a rotating set of photos that feels fresh every morning.

I also have full control over the information overlay. Most smart displays clutter the screen with news headlines I don’t care about or trending topics. My DIY frame shows the date, a minimalist weather icon, and the location where the photo was taken. If I want to change the font or move the clock to a different format, I can do that in the configuration file in seconds. There are more options to tinker around with, but that’s more or less all I need to make the display look clean while letting the photos shine through.

Dealing with the power and safety hurdles

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the practical challenges of this project. Leaving a lithium-ion battery plugged into a charger 24/7 is generally a bad idea. Over time, this can lead to battery degradation or even physical swelling, which is a fire hazard. To mitigate this, I’m using the tablet’s built-in smart charging feature to lock maximum charging to 80 percent.

Additionally, I use a smart plug combined with my home automation system. The plug only turns on when the battery hits 20 percent and shuts off at 80%. This keeps the battery healthy and ensures the tablet stays cool during everyday operations.

The other challenge is aesthetics. A tablet with a USB cable hanging off the side isn’t exactly fitting for a project designed to fit in my minimalist home decor. I solved this by 3D printing a bespoke wall-mount frame that lets the screen sit flush on my wall. All wiring and power adapters stay recessed in the wall behind the frame.

This project is a perfect example of why the self-hosting movement is growing so fast. I’m tired of being told that my perfectly functional hardware is obsolete just because the software development has slowed down. The recent announcements around the Kindle are yet another example of that forced obsolescence. By stripping away the bloated operating system and focusing on a single, high-quality use case, we can extend the life of our gadgets by years. It is better for the environment, better for our wallets, and better for our privacy.

This particular project didn’t cost me much more than time. The tablet was already paid off. The software is free. All it took was a few hours to turn a tablet that had otherwise been EOL’d into a fully functional photo frame. And since it’s entirely local, powering just a browser, it means that the tablet will stay functional for years, pulling images right off my personal photo server. That peace of mind is worth a lot more than the supposed convenience of off-the-shelf products.

If you have an old iPad or an Android tablet gathering dust, I highly recommend checking out the Immich Kiosk project. In fact, not just a tablet, you can even use a spare phone if all you want is a compact desktop photo frame. It’s the kind of project that provides immediate, tangible value to everyone in the household.

It turns out that the best smart display you can buy isn’t in a store at all. It might just be sitting in your drawer, waiting for you to give it a second life.