Digital photo frames – remember them? One-off devices that scrolled through your holiday snaps and photos of the kids. Well, now many of us have a souped-up digital photo frame in our lounges, kitchens and bedrooms in the form of the Amazon Echo Show. So how do you turn an Echo Show into a digital photo frame that shows your pics behind its scrolling onscreen information?

Time needed: 15 minutes

Display your own photos on an Echo Show

Upload photos to Amazon Photos
By far the easiest way to pull this off is to use another of Amazon’s services, Amazon Photos. If you’re an Echo Show owner, you’ve almost certainly got Amazon Prime and that affords you plenty of free storage in Amazon Photos. Sign in with your Amazon credentials and upload as many photos as you want to display on your Echo Show.
Put all the photos in an album
In a future step, you’ll be asked to select which album of photos you want the Echo Show to use for background images/clock faces. It makes sense to create a folder in Amazon Photos specfically for this purpose, so that you don’t end up with random photos displayed on your device. In the Amazon Photos site, click Albums, then Create Album. Give it a name such as “Show backgrounds” and then add as many photos as you want to use. Photos in the landcape format work much better, as they fit the ratio of the screen.
Dive into the Echo Show’s settings
Go to your Echo Show and say “Alexa, go to settings”. In the screen that appears, select Home & Clock, then Clock and then Personal Photos. Select Amazon Photos from the next screen and you’ll be shown a list of albums in your account. Select your Show Backgrounds album and you can choose to show that as the background image or the clock face.
The other way
There is another way to do this, using a single photo taken on your phone as the new background image. Open the Alexa app on your phone. Click Devices in the bottom right, then Echo & Alexa and pick your Show from the list. Now click Home Screen Background and scroll down to the Single Photo section, where you should find a button to upload a photo. I have to say, this produced an error in my tests, but your mileage may vary.