You can build a DIY digital photo frame to display pictures from any public Instagram account. Using a simple tool to grab images and a slideshow viewer, you can enjoy IG pics from the comfort of your living room!

A Raspberry Pi single board computer with display and a WiFi connection are all you need. Plus, you can set it and forget it -- a perfect gift for a family member or friend!

Raspberry Pi Quick Start

If you're setting up your Raspberry Pi for the first time, head to the official Raspberry Pi Getting Started guide. Here are the steps to follow:

• Once the SD card is flashed, eject it from you computer
• Insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi's microSD card slot

You can use nearly any combination of Raspberry Pi SBC and display for this, but a very nice, compact, photo frame-like option is the Pi Foundation 7" touchscreen display plus the Smarti Pi touch pro case/stand.

If you're using the Smarti Pi case, here are the official assembly instructions.

Once, assembled, plug in a mouse and keyboard to get things set up initially. You can later unplug them for photo frame use.

Power up the Rasbperry Pi by plugging in the USB power adapter, then follow the on-screen prompts set up your WiFi network, keyboard layout, and localization.

Optional Frame Orientation

You may want to orient your frame as a portrait (tall) instead of a landscape (wide) display. To do so, follow these steps:

Install Instaloader

Instaloader is the application you'll use to grab your pictures from an Instagram account. Head here to follow the instructions to install it on your Raspberry Pi from the terminal. I used the following command:

• pip3 install --break-system-packages instaloader

This should return Successfully installed instaloader-4.12.1 or later

Directory Prep

You can keep things tidy by creating a directory for the photo frame scripts and pictures. In the terminal type:

mkdir /home/pi/igframe

This will create a folder named igframe.

Navigate to the directory by typing:

cd /home/pi/igframe

Instaloader Image Download

From inside the igframe directory you can test out Instaloader. By default, Instaloader will grab images, videos, captions, metadata, and more, but we just want the still image files. Enter:

instaloader profile adafruit --no-videos --no-profile-pic --no-metadata-json -no-captions

This will automatically create a new directory inside the current directory named for the profile - adafruit - and then start downloading the IG images to the directory. You'll see feedback as the images download -- IG currently will limit this to twelve posts unless you are logged into your account. In case it seems to be downloading lots and lots of images without stopping you can hit ctrl-c at any time to stop it.

Note, you can substitute another IG account name if you like!

Check out the contents of the /home/pi/igframe/adafruit directory, you should see images from the latest twelve posts.

Install and Configure feh

Feh is a very nice command line image viewer, that happens to be perfect for running a slide show with specific parameters. 

 Let's install feh! Type this into the Terminal window, and then press return:

sudo apt-get install feh

This will download the necessary files and then install the application. When prompted, type Y and press return to continue.

DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority /usr/bin/feh --quiet --preload --randomize --full-screen --hide-pointer --slideshow-delay 5.0 /home/pi/igframe/adafruit &

Script It

Instead of retyping that command every time you want to run a slideshow, you can create a special type of text file, known as a shell script, to store the command (or many commands). This shell script can then be invoked any time you want to run the commands contained within.

Create a new shell script with this command:

sudo nano /home/pi/igframe/start-picture-frame.sh

Once again, this will launch the nano text editor. Copy and paste the code below into this into the file:

Close and save the shell script by pressing ctrl-x and then Y and return.

Now, run the shell script -- which will in turn run all of the contents of the file -- by typing this:

bash /home/pi/igframe/start-picture-frame.sh

That just ran your slideshow with a much shorter command. Much easier!

Permissions

Let's have a look at the current file permissions. In your Terminal, type this in to the list directory contents with verbose info:

ls -l /home/pi/igframe

That list of letters on the left side in front of each file shows you what type of permissions exist for the file.

Possible permissions are read, write, and execute for three types of accounts: owner, group, and user. Here's a very good primer on the subject.

For the slideshow script we see: 

-rw-r--r--

which means the file can be read and written by the owner ("root"), and only read (not executed or written) by groups and by users. This means the system (user "pi") doesn't have execution permission. So, we want to adjust that so the system can actually run the script without user intervention.

This simplest way to adjust this in our case is to grant execution permissions to all users. The chmod command is used to do so. Type this in your Terminal:

sudo chmod 755 /home/pi/igframe/start-picture-frame.sh

Autostart the Script

You may want to set up the Pi to automatically run your slideshow script on startup. This also means that if there is a loss of power, the system will not spend a long time stuck on a Linux screen!

To set the script to automatically run on startup we'll add a line to the desktop environment configuration script that automatically runs our picture frame shell script upon launch.

Open the autostart file for editing by typing:

sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Add a new line at the bottom and enter this text:

@./igframe/start-picture-frame.sh

As is by now the familiar routine, save and exit the file with ctrl-x, Y, return.

Once again, you'll need to restart the Pi to see the effects of your changes, so type: 

sudo reboot

This time, once the Pi reboots, it will launch the desktop, and then start the slideshow! How automagical!