How to Easily Get your Smart TV to Display Art

Here’s an easy tutorial on how to get your smart tv to display art (or your family photos), where to find art and how to set it up so you can have a beautiful art display on your wall! Get rid of that black hole in the room and make it part of your decor!

You’ve probably at least seen or heard about the Samsung Frame TV recently. It’s a pretty amazing tv in a frame that hangs on your wall and doesn’t look like a giant tv black hole in your living space.

It’s funny that we’ve moved up from having a huge tv cabinet in our rooms to having a huge black hole now. I’m not sure it’s an improvement, it’s really just a different decorating challenge.

The Samsung Smart TV

The Samsung Smart TV that everyone is talking about is, in fact, pretty special.

It has this amazing ability to look like a piece of art in a frame when you’re not watching a show on it and that’s pretty appealing.

The price tag, however, might give you a bit of a pause.

The good news is that if you already own a smart tv, you can make your very own art display like the one below!

Make your smart tv display art — via White Picket Farmhouse

How to Choose Images for Your Smart TV

Let’s start by talking about what kind of images will work on your smart tv.

Some TV’s include Art

If you want to make your smart tv display art it’s important to know that some of the different tv displays already have built in art gallery modes and you can select that art or the art that is already provided.

This is a bonus because it means you don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for images.

If You’re Using Your Own Art (or photos)

If you’re planning to use your own art or photo’s (even if your tv already has art) I would highly recommend that you create a dedicated album for your TV so that you can load images into it and they’ll be easy to find.

You’ll need photo’s that are horizontal to fit your screen the best.

Some of your photo’s may not look great when they’re blown up on a big screen so if you’re using photo’s from your phone be sure to check that they’re high quality and oriented correctly.

We recommend you create a dedicated album in Google Photos, and you can load up your own images or other images of artwork you like.

Maybe you want to check out some of NASA’s amazing still shots of space.

In any case, you should curate an album specifically for your TV.

Just connecting your media file from your phone or computer could bring up some funny images but they might not always be the ones you want your company to see, which is why we recommend a dedicated album!

We once connected an album without checking it first and there were several images that we didn’t even know were saved that popped up on our tv.

Luckily no one else was around and we had a good laugh, but even though they reminded us of good times, they weren’t photos that we’d want to share to an audience of neighbors!

Where to find images that you can use

Several smart tv’s will come with a gallery for displaying art, but if you need or want to create your own gallery here are a few places.

Of course you can always use your own images and there are images for sale on various sites including Etsy but we’re sharing some links to places where you can find other art.

These links will lead you to gallery’s where you can search and download all kinds of art.

You’re going to want to get a nice cool drink and a timer before you start on this project.

It’s always a good idea to know where your images are sourced from and credit accordingly. You never, ever want to get into copyright questions so be sure to look for images that are designated as part of the public domain.

Many government photo’s and copyright free photo’s can be found online.

Here is an article to explain CCO: The Smithsonian OpenAccess FAQ.

Here are several places that you can find images!

There are plenty of other places to find images that you can use, these are just a few suggestions to try.

How to Get your Smart TV to Display Art

Now we get to the nitty gritty.

Most of these are pretty straight forward though so I think you’ll find it pretty easy to create your very own art gallery!

Apple TV

The apple tv is easy to use since it will integrate with your photo’s saved in iCloud. You’ll want to have an album that holds the photo’s to use on your tv and then all you have to do is connect it. Or share it if you’re an apple user.

Start by uploading images or photo’s to an album
Turn on your iCloud integration in your Apple TV settings
Do not turn on photo stream
Go to screen saver options
Click on photo’s, then choose iCloud
Choose the designated album

If you don’t want to designate an album you can use photo stream and you’ll see all the photo’s in your stream.

If you want to use a specific album like I suggested, you’ll choose not to use Photo Stream.

Amazon FireTV

If you use Amazon FireTV you won’t be able to access Google Photo’s. That’s because Amazon has it’s own photo app.

If you have Amazon Prime you can access unlimited storage for all your photo’s as well.

Customers that have a regular Amazon account get 5GB of storage at no cost. If you didn’t know about this great storage then consider it a bonus because we all need more storage of digital files these days!

If you just want to run the default FireTV photo’s then just turn on the screensaver option and accept the defaults. There are some beautiful landscape photo’s and we’ve definitely spent some time trying to guess where each photo is from.

To get your Amazon Fire smart tv to display art or your own photo’s:

Download the Amazon Photo’s app or sign in on the web
Upload your chosen photo’s and create a folder for them
On your settings, then display, then click the screen saver option
Select your album
Customize the timing

You may have to adjust the timing after you’ve watched it a bit. You can easily speed it up or slow it down to make it more interesting to watch.

Chromecast

Chromecast’s screensaver feature works like the Google Home Hub so if you’re familiar with it you’ll have no problem setting this up.

In the Google Home app you find our Chromecast tv, tap on it, choose ambient mode, art gallery and you’re done.

If you want to display your own images follow these steps:

Upload your images to Google Photo’s
Open the Google Home app and find your Chromecast tv
Click on ambient mode and choose your designated album

Roku

Roku has a free app that you can use to display your images onto your smart tv. Once you’re logged into the app you can choose the media icon and choose photo’s, then select the photo’s that you want to share on your Roku device.

The only downside is that you will have to update your album manually to add or remove photo’s.

You can also use Google Photo’s to share a gallery on your Roku device. To do this:

Install the Photo View channel on your roku device
Upload images to Google Photo
Open Photo View and sign in with your Google account
Choose the album
Set Photo View as Roku’s screen saver option
Adjust the screensaver settings to change the amount of time before the screensaver starts

Enjoy your fabulous new artwork!

It doesn’t matter which device you use to display art or photo’s on your tv, you will want to choose images that look good in a large format.

You might have to watch your slide show a few times and add new images and remove the ones that don’t showcase as well.

You may need to play around with your settings on your tv to make the lighting brighter or dimmer to get the best effect as well.

Once you get this figured out you’re going to be amazed at how beautiful your new artwork is.

I hope that these steps are easy for you to follow – if I missed one let me know in the comments below and I’ll fix it!

Want more great decorating ideas? Be sure to check these out!

Be sure to follow me on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest for more inspiration!

How to Easily Get your Smart TV to Display Art

The Samsung Smart TV