A family photo frame
The photo frame is already in your living room.
Mantelpiece turns a TV you already own into a photo frame the whole family fills. Invite the people you want, they send pictures from their phone, and the screen keeps itself up to date. Nobody has to press anything.
TV app for LG first, other makes to follow. Any tablet, laptop or spare phone can be the screen in the meantime.
How it works
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01
Put it on a screen.
Open Mantelpiece on the television, or in a browser on a tablet, an old laptop, a phone you no longer use. It shows a short code. Type that into your frame once and the slideshow starts on its own. There is nothing to sign into on the screen again.
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02
Invite the family.
Everyone gets a link. They choose photos on their phone and send. Pictures are resized before they leave the handset, so a fortnight in Cornwall does not cost a fortnight of somebody's data allowance.
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03
The photos turn up.
New pictures are on screen within a minute, with whatever caption came with them and the name of whoever sent them, so the room knows who to thank. No refreshing, no remote, no cable.
Sharing
Everyone can send. You decide what stays up.
The hard part of family photos was never storage. It is that half the family will happily install an app and the other half will not, and neither half should get the run of your living room wall by default.
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A link each, so you can take one back
Invite people one at a time and each gets their own way in. Revoke somebody and everyone else carries on exactly as before. No group chat to leave, nobody to explain it to.
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Or a link with no sign-up at all
Send an open link and all anyone needs is a first name. No account, no app store, no password to talk somebody through over the phone. It is the difference between your aunt sending photos and your aunt meaning to.
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Photos wait until you say yes
Anything from someone you have not switched to automatic sits in a queue. It is grouped by sender and by album, so a fifty-photo wedding is one decision rather than fifty. Turn a person to automatic once you trust their eye.
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It need not all fall to you
Anyone in the household can be given the keys: settings, screens, the guest list and the queue. Whoever set the frame up should not be the only one who can clear it.
Frames, screens and albums
One frame can be on more than one screen.
A frame is a photo library, not a television. Put the same one on the set in your front room and on your mum's, two hundred miles away, and both show the same pictures with one place to manage them. Add the tablet in the kitchen if you like. Every screen is listed by name, and disconnecting one takes a tap.
Albums stay in step on their own.
An album is a set of photos you keep up to date, and it belongs to you rather than to any one frame. Put it on as many frames as you like: add a picture and it appears on all of them, take one out and it comes down from all of them. Send the good ones from the wedding, then quietly remove the four that were not.
Details
Small print, in normal-sized type.
- No feed, no ads, nothing suggested. What is on the screen is what your family sent. Nothing is ranked, promoted, or held back for later.
- Your photos are not training data and are not sold, shared or scanned for anything. Image links are signed and expire, so nothing sits on a URL a stranger could guess.
- Delete means delete. Take a photo off a frame and it is off that frame, without disturbing anywhere else the same picture is showing. Close an account and it all goes.
- Easy on the panel. Photos change every twenty seconds with a slow drift, portrait shots get a soft blurred fill instead of black bars, and captions move around the frame. It looks calmer that way, and it is kinder to an OLED left on all afternoon.
- Quiet overnight. The frame dims between 22:00 and 07:00 by default, on our clock rather than the television's, so it does not drift or reset when the set is unplugged.
Pricing
Free while Mantelpiece is in early access.
No card, no trial clock. Pricing is not settled yet, and rather than leave that vague, here are the two parts of it that already are.
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People sending photos will never pay.
Not for an account, not for storage, not for a bigger allowance, not ever. A photo frame that asks your aunt for a card number before she can send a picture of the dog is a photo frame with no photos on it.
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If anyone pays, it is whoever owns the frame.
One household, one frame, a sensible number of photos: that is the case we intend to keep free. What a paid plan is likely to be for is more frames, a much larger library, and albums across several of them.
Nothing here is charged per screen. Putting the same frame on your TV and on your mother's is the point of the thing, not an upsell.
Put the good ones back on the mantelpiece.
Free while in early access. No card.