Photo sharing to an iPad in a remote location with no human intervention?

January 10, 2011 11:14 AM

Best solution to take iPhone photos and have them displayed on an iPad in another location with no human intervention?

Would like to take photos with my iPhone and have them automatically show up on the iPad's photo screensaver in another location (my grandparents' place) without them having to do anything. Has anyone done this successfully?

posted by drewgillson to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

If you don't get a good answer here, I would ask this question in the Dropbox Forums. Dropbox plus some app to move photos from Dropbox to a photo album would be ideal -- the question is whether such an app exists.

Any such solution will require that they have upgraded to iOS 4.2 to enable multitasking (or bought/received the iPad since 4.2 was released), so that the app can run in the background.
posted by misterbrandt at 11:50 AM on January 10, 2011

iphone --> flickr --> flickr slideshow running on ipad?
posted by lia at 11:51 AM on January 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

I don't have an ipad so I don't know if the ipad works this way but, building on misterbrandt's answer, couldn't you create a drewgilson's photos folder in their dropbox account (on their ipad) and just set the screensaver on their ipad to pull from pictures in that particular folder?
posted by Siena at 12:49 PM on January 10, 2011

Siena, if you are using the built-in screensaver (AKA "Picture Frame") it looks like you can only designate "All Photo Albums" or pick specific albums -- AKA you cannot designate a source outside the Photos app. (disclaimer: no iPad here either. Just googling)

There may be a third-party screensaver type app that will work? But in terms of it "just work"ing for the grandparents, I think as much as you can rely on native apps and features the better.
posted by misterbrandt at 12:56 PM on January 10, 2011

Doubt this is possible out of the box. I guess if your phone is jailbroken you could always write a script that will move the pictures from your phone into a Dropbox folder via SSH automatically every night, then have your grandparent's screensaver set up to use pics from that folder.
posted by Thoughtcrime at 3:30 PM on January 10, 2011

Is what you really want a Ceiva? Much cheaper than an iPad, and much easier to set up. I used one to set up baby pictures for grandparents - worked like a charm, no hassles.
posted by bemis at 5:54 PM on January 11, 2011

Just to experiment, I tried FotoFrame on my ipad with my Flickr account and it works pretty well. You can turn the ipad off and when you turn it back on, it resumes playing. The presentation is a bit underwhelming with double matte of buff paper that makes the pictures kind of smaller than necessary (but hey, it's FREE) and the only option is to change the speed. Also, you need to re-choose the flickr account as source before it will update the slideshow but that's no big deal. It worked well but you might find better options out there. Of course, you'll need to have a wifi going at your gp's.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:58 PM on January 11, 2011