Skip to main content

Turn your Fire TV into a digital picture frame with new voice control features

Amazon Prime’s photo service is going from visual to verbal. Fire TV users can now ask Alexa to put photos up on their TV. The Prime Photos update, which rolled out August 3, allows users to put photos (and videos) on their TV using just voice commands and the remote control. Amazon Prime Photos on Fire TV can sort photos by date, location or even who — or what — is in the shots.

Prime Photos is an extra perk for Prime Members, backing up photos so a hard drive crash isn’t quite so disastrous. But along with the photo storage, the platform includes tools for sorting and searching through images — and now those same tools make photos accessible with a simple voice command. The feature isn’t entirely hands free — users have to press the microphone button on the remote — but it beats trying to type out a search with only a TV remote.

Recommended Videos

From the general, Alexa, show me my photos, to the specific Alexa, show photos of Tom, the new tool allows users to not only quickly access but quickly sort and display images. Photos can be displayed by date, album, person, or even by an object or animal, like requesting all your cat photos at once. The more advanced features, including facial recognition, are only available for Prime members.

Since Prime Photos is pre-installed on Fire TV devices, users won’t have to do much to get the feature up and running. Photos are uploaded through mobile devices or desktop computers with the Prime Photos app. The software will automatically recognize faces that appear across multiple photos, but users will have to tell the program who that person is by adding a name inside the app.

Users can also use the feature to play slideshows, filling the TV with photos as a sort of screensaver when not actually tuning into a show. The latest update is also compatible with Prime Photos Family Vault, a feature that allows multiple family members to upload images to the same account.

Along with working on Amazon Fire TV, the new features are also accessible through the company’s new Echo Show.

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Hisense prices its 65-inch CanvasTV way less than The Frame
Hisense CanvasTV.

Hisense's new -- a direct competitor to Samsung's popular The Frame TV -- can now be ordered in its 65-inch size for $1,300. That's $700 less than Samsung's $2,000 regular price on its 65-inch Frame TV. Hisense had previously announced that the 55-inch CanvasTV would cost $999, but that smaller model has yet to hit retail.

Hisense has a history of offering deep discounts on its TVs, so we may see both sizes of CanvasTV (officially known as Hisense Class S7 CanvasTV 4K QLED Google TV) drop in price in the not-too-distant future.

Read more
Apple TV’s InSight feature is ready to take on Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray
Apple TV's Insight feature showing character and music information on screen.

We have a new developer beta for tvOS 18 — the software that runs on Apple TV devices — and with it comes our first look at a major new feature. InSight is Apple's answer to Amazon Prime Video's X-Ray, which provides quick and easy access to who's in a scene, and what music may be accompanying it.

Aside from some basic user interface differences like fonts and design elements — InSight definitively looks and feels like Apple, and X-Ray retains Prime Video's less-sleek motif — they basically work the same. While a movie or show is playing, you can pause or press down (the latter takes you straight to the info) to see thumbnails of the actors on-screen, including their real name (or stage name, we suppose), and the character's name. Click through one of the thumbnails and you'll get more information about the actor, and easy links to other films and shows they appear in, as well as roles they have served in some other capacity. Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein, for example, has movie and series thumbnails, and he also has tiles for producing and writing.

Read more
Game Pass is coming to your Amazon Fire TV, even if you don’t own an Xbox
A woman holding a remote while looking at an Amazon Fire TV with the Xbox app on it. It's on the Cloud Gaming menu with Fallout 76, Senua's Saga Hellblade 2 and more on it.

You'll soon no longer need an Xbox console if you have an Amazon Fire TV. Microsoft and Amazon announced Thursday that the Xbox app is coming to Fire TV devices in July.

The Xbox app works with Cloud Gaming, which means with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you can stream a huge catalog of games from the Xbox library, including many first- and third-party titles that come to the service on launch day. Huge games like Starfield, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and the Fallout series are just some examples, and the available games are always changing.

Read more