helloseyedjafari/google-photos-homey-widget

This project is a widget for the Homey Pro smart home dashboard that turns a public Google Photos album into a live slideshow, using nothing more than a shared album link. There is no need to copy photos into a special folder, no Google API setup, and no API keys to configure before it works. You paste a public Google Photos share link into the widget's settings, and it streams the photos directly from Google's servers, only ever holding on to their web addresses rather than downloading or duplicating anything locally. Because Google removed certain official photo API access in 2025, this widget deliberately avoids that official API altogether and instead reads the same public page a regular browser would see when visiting a shared album. A key design goal is that the slideshow keeps working correctly even after the dashboard screen has been dimmed or gone idle for a while, which the developer notes is a common problem with other dashboard widgets. It does this by calculating which photo should currently be showing directly from the system clock, rather than relying on a timer that might have paused, so the instant the screen wakes up it simply jumps to the correct photo instead of losing its place in the sequence. Settings let you choose how long each photo displays, whether they play in shuffle order or by date, whether photos are cropped to fill the widget or shown in full with letterboxing, whether transitions crossfade, and how often the widget checks the album for newly added photos. Only photos are shown, videos in the album are automatically skipped, and only the first roughly three hundred photos in an album are available due to how the public album page loads its content in a browser. Installation requires a Homey Pro device on a recent firmware version, along with the Homey command line tool used to log in and install the app onto your device. The project notes that this only works on Homey Pro hardware, not Homey Cloud, since it depends on features only the Pro device supports.