Google TV & Android TV

Your TV, hung like a framed print.

Art Frame TV mounts your Google Photos and gallery classics inside photorealistic picture frames with real passe-partout matting — bevelled, bottom-weighted, archival. The screen stops looking like a slideshow and starts looking like art on the wall.

Free to use. No account, no ads, no analytics, no tracking.

The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Why it looks real

Most TV photo apps fill the screen. This one rebuilds what a framer does.

Four details do almost all the work. Each one is a thing a human framer gets right and a slideshow gets wrong.

A 45° bevelled core

The cut edge of the mat board is angled, so it catches light along the top and left and falls into shadow bottom and right. That bright hairline is the single strongest cue that something is matted rather than cropped.

Bottom-weighted matting

The bottom mat sits about 18% wider than the top and sides. It is the oldest convention in the trade: visually centred is slightly high, and an evenly matted print reads as sliding downward in the frame.

A recessed depth shadow

Mat board has thickness, so it casts a real shadow onto the print sitting behind it. Without that shadow the artwork looks printed on the mat; with it, the print is clearly set back under a window.

Anti-reflective museum glaze

A 3% specular sheen across the whole frame — the faint, almost-invisible glint of museum glass. Overdo it and you get a glossy screen; at 3% your eye just reads "there is glass over this".

Materials

Colours matched to conservation mat board, not invented on screen.

Six archival mat colours and six mouldings, in four widths from Slim to Deep, all on the remote with a live preview behind the panel. Warm Cotton White and Dark Walnut are free; the rest come with Studio Unlock.

Passe-partout mat board

    Frame mouldings

      Mat thickness

      How much board sits between the moulding and the print. Wide is what makes a small picture look deliberate; slim suits a photograph you want to fill the wall.

        Frame width

        The moulding itself, from a hairline edge to a deep gallery section. Both scales are on the D-pad, with the frame redrawing live behind the panel.

          Your photos · Studio Unlock

          Pick on your phone. It appears on the wall.

          Google Photos connects through Google's official Photos Picker, so Art Frame TV only ever receives the photos you choose — never the rest of your library. Your own photos are part of Studio Unlock; the thirty bundled images are free.

          Scan the code

          The TV puts a QR code on screen. Point your phone at it — no typing an email address with a D-pad.

          Choose the photos

          Google Photos opens on your phone. Select whatever you want hanging on the wall and confirm.

          They live on the TV

          Each picture is saved locally at up to 4K, so the frame keeps working offline and as the screensaver.

          Three ways in

          • Photos PickerOfficial Google API. QR code on the TV, picker on your phone. Studio Unlock.
          • Shared album linkPaste a photos.app.goo.gl link, or send one from your phone's browser over your home Wi-Fi.
          • Nothing at allThe thirty bundled images work out of the box, free, with no sign-in.

          And a gallery already inside

          Thirty images ship with the app — seven public-domain masterworks, and twenty-three photographs. No sign-in, nothing to configure, nothing to subscribe to.

          Minimalist, for a modern room

          Twenty of the thirty are architectural and geometric photographs — facades, staircases, light and shadow. Quieter than a Van Gogh on a wall you walk past every day.

          Two ways to hang it

          Just open it. Or let it appear on its own.

          Art Frame TV is an ordinary app. Open it from your Apps row whenever you want the frame up — a dinner, a party, a quiet Sunday — and it fills the screen until you press Back. No setup, no ADB, nothing to configure. That is the whole thing.

          Optionally, it also installs a native Android TV screensaver, for when you would rather the frame arrived by itself once the set goes idle, and left the moment you pick up the remote. A gentle, microscopic drift protects OLED panels from burn-in.

          That part takes a little work, because Google TV insists on its own Ambient Mode: you select Art Frame TV Screensaver under Screensaver Override in a launcher like Projectivy or FLauncher, or run one ADB command. The setup guide covers both — and you never have to do either.

          Everything on the D-pad

          • OK / MenuOpen the Frame & Matte Studio
          • Left / RightPrevious and next artwork
          • Play / PauseHold on the current picture
          • BackClose the overlay
          • Interval15 seconds to one hour

          Price

          Free is a finished frame, not a crippled one.

          The whole realism engine runs on the free tier — bevelled core, bottom-weighted mat, depth shadow, museum glaze, burn-in drift — on all thirty bundled images. Studio Unlock buys breadth, not the basics.

          Free

          No account, no ads, no time limit

          • GalleryAll thirty bundled images
          • MouldingDark Walnut, or frameless
          • MatWarm Cotton White, slim to medium
          • FramingThe full realism engine
          • RemoteBrightness, two presets
          • ScreensaverIncluded

          Studio Unlock $4.99 once

          Early-adopter price · no subscription

          • Your photosGoogle Photos and shared albums
          • MouldingsAll six, four widths
          • MatsAll six colours, five margins
          • Interval15 seconds to an hour
          • StudioBevel, depth, paper and glaze tuning
          • PresetsAll six

          Privacy

          Nothing about you leaves the television.

          There is no account to make and no profile to build, because the app has nowhere to put one. Your photos are stored on the TV and excluded from cloud backup, adb backup and device-to-device transfer. Read the full privacy policy.

          0Accounts required
          0Analytics SDKs
          0Ads or trackers
          HTTPSOnly, enforced
          15 minSign-in hand-off lifetime

          Questions

          Before you install it.

          Which devices does it run on?
          Google TV and Android TV devices on Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer — Chromecast with Google TV, Google TV Streamer, Nvidia Shield, and the built-in Android TV in Sony, Philips, TCL and Hisense sets. It is a TV app: there is no phone version, because the phone is only used to pick photos.
          What does it cost?
          The app is free, and the free tier is a finished frame rather than a crippled one — the whole realism engine runs on all thirty bundled images, in Dark Walnut or frameless, on Warm Cotton White mat, with brightness on the remote. Studio Unlock is a single payment of $4.99, an early-adopter price, with no subscription and no ads ever. It adds your own Google Photos, every mat colour and moulding, all the widths and margins, the slide interval, and the fine-tuning in the Frame & Matte Studio.
          How do I make the picture look like a real print?
          Drop your TV's backlight to 25–35% and switch the picture mode to Warm or Filmmaker Mode. Real artwork does not emit light, and lowering the brightness is what finishes the illusion more than any setting inside the app. Slightly reducing contrast helps too.
          Do I have to set it up as the screensaver?
          No — and most people never do. Art Frame TV is a normal app: open it from the Apps row and the frame is up. The screensaver is a bonus for people who want the frame to appear on its own when the TV goes idle, and it is the only part that needs a launcher setting or an ADB command, because Google TV reserves idle time for its own Ambient Mode. Skipping it costs you nothing.
          Does it see my whole Google Photos library?
          No. Google's Photos Picker API — the only route Google has permitted since March 2025 — hands an app just the items you explicitly select in the picker, and nothing else. The access token lives on the TV, is excluded from backup, and you can revoke it at any time from your Google Account's third-party access page.
          Does it work without an internet connection?
          Yes, once photos are on the device. Picked photos are downloaded at up to 4K and shown from local storage, so the frame and the screensaver keep running offline. The bundled masterworks stream from Wikimedia Commons and are cached.
          Will it burn my OLED?
          The app applies a continuous, microscopic Ken Burns drift precisely so no edge sits on the same pixels, and the slide interval is adjustable from 15 seconds up. Combined with a lowered backlight, which is the recommended look anyway, static-image risk stays low.

          Art Frame TV

          Hang something on the wall.

          Museum-quality framing for your photos and art, on the television you already own.

          Coming soon on Google Play

          Google TV & Android TV · Android 8.0 or newer