How to Put a Photo Slideshow on a TV From Your iPhone, for Homes, Shops and Events

What people usually try first, and why it disappoints

AirPlay from Photos works, but it depends on your network, it stops when something interrupts the phone, and mirroring puts a phone-shaped picture on a widescreen panel with black bars either side.

A USB stick in the TV works if the TV has a media player, but you're copying files around and the TV's slideshow settings are usually terrible, fixed timing, no transitions, and whatever order it feels like.

Cast from an app puts you at the mercy of whatever the app decided a slideshow should be.

What you actually want is control over duration, transition, fill and looping, on a screen that's fully used.

The setup

XeOS: External Display Browser renders a desktop at the display's own resolution rather than mirroring the phone, and it has a real Photos app that reads your actual iOS library, the same albums, the same favourites, with a proper full-screen slideshow.

1. Connect and grant access

USB-C to HDMI, or a Lightning Digital AV Adapter on older iPhones. Use a multiport adapter with pass-through power if it's running for more than an hour, which for this use case it always is.

Open the Photos app and grant full photo library access when iOS asks. Limited access, hand-picking a few photos, won't work: only the photos you picked are visible, so albums stay empty.

2. Pick the album

Switch to Albums. Everything you made on your phone is there, with covers and counts.

3. Set it up properly

Starting a slideshow opens an options sheet before anything plays, which is the part the TV's own media player never gives you:

For an unattended display, the settings that matter:

• Repeat: on. Otherwise it stops after one pass.
• Scale photos to fit: off. This is the one people miss. On, photos fit inside the screen with letterboxing where the shape doesn't match. Off, they fill the screen and crop the edges, no black anywhere, which is what you want in a shop window.
• Duration: 8–10 seconds for a public display. Five feels hurried when people are glancing at it.
• Transition: Cross-Fade. Calm, and works with any mix of photos.
• Ken Burns: on for atmosphere, off for product shots where slow drift is distracting.
• Shuffle: on if the same people will see it repeatedly.

4. Play

The slideshow takes over the whole display. Controls fade away after a few seconds and come back on input. Photos still in iCloud are downloaded a couple of slides ahead, so a library that lives mostly in the cloud plays smoothly.

Leaving it running all day

• Power. Multiport adapter with pass-through charging, into a proper charger.
• Auto-lock off, iOS Settings › Display & Brightness › Auto-Lock › Never.
• Do Not Disturb on, so a notification doesn't appear on a shop window.
• Cable, not AirPlay. Over hours, network hiccups will find you.
• Check the TV's picture size, set it to "Just Scan", "Screen Fit" or "1:1" so the TV isn't adding its own border.

Photos that aren't in your library

Two other routes, same player or same screen:

• A folder, mount a folder from iCloud Drive, from the phone, or from a USB drive, and run the same slideshow on it. Handy when the photos were supplied by someone else. See the drives guide.
• Google Photos, open a shared album in the browser, start Google's own slideshow, and press the green button so the window fills the display. Covered in the slideshow guide.