Picalator

Free for a limited time. Point Picalator at an album and it shows your photos full screen, with the time and the weather. Your photos never leave your iPad.

A photo frame for the iPad you already own.

Most of us have an iPad that has been replaced but still works perfectly well. It is a beautiful screen doing nothing.

Picalator gives it a job. Choose the albums you want, stand the iPad somewhere you walk past, and your photographs come back to you: the ones you took, not the ones an algorithm picked.

YOUR ALBUMS, ON ROTATION

Tick as many albums as you like. Add photos to them from any of your devices and they appear on the frame by themselves.

Tick a shared album and the photos your family add turn up without anybody doing anything.

WHERE AND WHEN

Each photo quietly names the place it was taken and the month it was taken in: "Bruges, Belgium - October 2024".

Far from home it names the district. Close to home it names the park you were standing in, because "Sydney" tells a Sydneysider nothing. Picalator works this out from the location already inside your photos and a home town you type once. It never asks for your location to do it.

Tap the screen and a map appears beside the caption, so you can see exactly where a photo was taken without leaving the frame.

IT KNOWS WHERE THE FACES ARE

Photos drift very slowly across the screen. Picalator keeps the faces in view rather than letting them slide off the edge, and where there are no faces it holds on to whatever the photo is of.

This happens entirely on your iPad. It works out where a face is and never who it is.

A CLOCK YOU CHOOSE

Digital, day and date, a word clock, a flip clock or analogue. Set its size, its corner and how present it is, or turn it off altogether.

Local weather sits in the other corner, if you want it.

ONE PICTURE, FRAMED

Show a single photograph in a real picture frame instead. Pinch and drag to crop out the wall, or the frame that was in your own shot, then lock it in place.

It can drift across itself over hours, far too slowly to catch it moving. Glance up and it is a still picture. Glance up later and you are looking at a different part of it.

ASLEEP WHEN YOU ARE

Set times for the screen to turn off overnight and while you are out. On older iPads the backlight glows faintly even behind a black screen, so Picalator dims the display right down as well, then brings it gently back up just before it is due to wake.

Different albums can have different parts of the day: the bike rides in the morning, the family at night. Or let Picalator surprise you with something different every day.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR IPAD

No accounts. No sign-in. No uploads. No analytics. No advertising.

Picalator reads the albums you choose from Apple Photos and displays them. That is the whole of it. Your photos are never modified, never copied off the device and never sent anywhere.

Your settings travel between your own devices through your own iCloud, so your iPad and Apple TV agree with each other. Only the settings travel.

ONE PURCHASE

Buy it once. No subscription, and every feature is there from the start.

Runs on any iPad with iOS 16 or later. Older iPads are exactly what this was made for.

Keep the iPad plugged in: the screen stays awake while Picalator is running, which is rather the point of a photo frame.

Weather data provided by Apple Weather.