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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 →SetupPut 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.

Where it runs

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 — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install
  1. Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
  2. Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
  3. 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>.
  4. Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash
  1. Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
  2. Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
  3. Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
  4. Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.
sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk
  1. On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
  2. Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
  3. Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
  4. 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.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
collectionssix curated collectionsWhat may appear — comma-separated collection slugs, a Met department id/slug, or all.
dwell120Seconds each artwork is held (5–86400).
placardonThe wall label.
matgallery-whitewarm, linen, sage, slate, charcoal, black, or any hex.
margin7Mat margin as a percentage of the screen’s shorter side (0–22).
frameshadowhairline or none.
reslargeoriginal for the archival file, right for 4K panels.
shuffleonoff walks each collection in catalogue order.
seedrandomPins 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.
dim0Black 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 repositories go public at launch.