TL;DR DietPi has an easy to configure kiosk mode to boot up opening a website. E.g. your gallery displayed with ImmichFrame

The photos

Part of my post vacation workflow involves collecting all photos taken, sorting out the 90% duplicates and blurry ones, and slapping the remaining into an album. There they can sit until some unlucky person asks me about my last journey, or I get an urge to look at them again (about once every three years).

Since using Immich I get these flashbacks a little more often, since it has this memory feature that shows photos from x years ago (folders don't have that. Yeah I used folders before). This still involves opening the app on my phone though, which I'd like to use less in the first place. If only there I had a big screen somewhere in my home that could display images at a decent resolution...

The frame

There is digital frames for that, but I don't want to make room for one. Maybe later. What I realized is: My TV displays this one (pseudo) artsy drawing whenever I turn it on. Instead of seeing this same boring image 5-10min every day: Why not enjoy my photos?

There might be a TV app for that, but I don't want to be opening/installing apps on the TV - I need my photos to show in the 'default' mode (which might be possible with an app, but I didn't bother to check). Instead I grabbed an old RPi3 and installed ~~Raspbian~~ RaspberryPiOS (it has been a while...) and ImmichFrame. A promising looking app that is meant to take my Immich albums and display them. Everything worked super quick, but opening the browser to display the ImmichFrame page hosted in Docker. While messing with a script to open the browser on boot, I noticed that everything felt a little (a lot) laggy. (In hindsight I was probably overheating my little PI due to missing cooling. Fixed this later as well)

The diet

Looking at lightweight OS for the Pi, I discovered DietPi and gave it a quick install. It is very convenient to configure via the console, and while messing around there I stumbled across something-something kiosk mode. That's exactly what I needed! Lucky me didn't know about such things, but it makes sense I guess. Just configure a URL and it will display that page on every boot. Currently ImmichFrame is hosted on the PI as well, so I added a little wait loop into the startup of the kiosk mode, but that's all. Performance is ok right now, but if it continues to lag, I'll just host ImmichFrame on my server.

The Pi gets plugged into the TV and is running all the time, since I could not think of a smarter way. Now I have a neat solution that is fully under my control.