Gallery Frame

A museum wall that changes its mind. Public-domain works from the world’s open-access collections, matted and hung with a real placard — title, maker, date, medium, accession number. Each piece holds for a couple of minutes, and the crossfade only begins once the next image is fully decoded, so the wall never shows you a half-loaded painting.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Gallery Frame landscape panel: J.M.W. Turner's Saltash with the Water Ferry, Cornwall shown matted on a gallery-white wall with a museum-style placard. — LandscapeMatted to the work, not the screen.

Gallery Frame portrait panel: Velázquez's Portrait of a Man, framed and placarded the same way in portrait orientation. — PortraitA portrait work gets a portrait mat.

Where the art comes from

The Met’s Open Access collection, with the Rijksmuseum as an optional second source. Only public-domain works are shown, and the placard carries the museum’s own catalogue data.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container, no database. Images are proxied and cached in memory so the browser never talks to a museum directly and nothing is hotlinked.

What it wants

A screen you walk past. It is the one display that rewards a bigger panel — the mat and placard are drawn to the proportions of the work, not the monitor.

Setup

Put Gallery Frame on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

LivingKiosk app

Get the app and its install steps at livingkiosk.com/mac. It isn’t notarized yet, so macOS asks you to approve it once.
Menu bar → Library… and pick a display for each screen.
Configure… on any screen for its reload schedule, dim, and saved configs.

See the Mac app →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at frame.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`collections`	six curated collections	What may appear — comma-separated collection slugs, a Met department id/slug, or `all`.
`dwell`	120	Seconds each artwork is held (5–86400).
`placard`	on	The wall label.
`mat`	gallery-white	`warm`, `linen`, `sage`, `slate`, `charcoal`, `black`, or any hex.
`margin`	7	Mat margin as a percentage of the screen’s shorter side (0–22).
`frame`	shadow	`hairline` or `none`.
`res`	large	`original` for the archival file, right for 4K panels.
`shuffle`	on	`off` walks each collection in catalogue order.
`seed`	random	Pins the shuffle so two screens run the same show in the same order.
`id`	—	Pin one object by Met or Rijksmuseum id and stop rotating.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Gallery Frame is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.