Questions & Answers

Search for CloudFrame TV in the Roku Channel Store. On your Roku, this is found by visiting the Streaming Store and searching, or open the CloudFrame TV listing in any browser and add it. CloudFrame TV is available on Roku in the United States. The app is free to add, and casting from your phone is free to use; the optional OneDrive photo library is a paid subscription. Once added, the app appears on your Roku home screen.

A Roku and a phone or tablet with a web browser. That’s it for the free casting. There is nothing to install on the phone, and no account to create. The app needs Roku software 15.1 or newer, so if the Channel Store offers it to your device, your device can run it. If you want to display photos from your personal OneDrive photo library, we log you in with your Microsoft account. (See section below.)

No. Your photos travel by way of our server rather than directly between the two devices, so they each just need to be online. A phone on mobile data can cast to a TV across the room, or across the country.

1. Open CloudFrame TV on your Roku and choose Cast from your phone.
2. Scan the QR code with your phone’s camera. If scanning isn’t convenient, go to cast.cloudframe.tv in any browser and type the eight-character code the TV is showing.
3. Tap Choose photos and add up to fifty to display on the TV.
4. They appear on the TV a few seconds later.

Press Back on the remote when you’re finished.

They’re two separate things. Casting sends a few photos from your phone to the TV for a while, then deletes them. This requires no account, there is nothing to set up, and it’s free for anyone. The OneDrive library connects your own OneDrive so your whole photo collection is on the TV whenever you want it: your folders and albums, an always-on photo frame, and On This Day. Casting is free forever; the library is a subscription with a free trial. There’s more on the OneDrive page.

The OneDrive library starts with a 7-day free trial. After that it renews automatically at $24.99 a year, or $3.99 a month if you’d rather pay monthly, and keeps renewing until you cancel. Prices are in USD, and any taxes are calculated at checkout. You provide a payment method when you start the trial but aren’t charged during it, and you connect your own OneDrive during the trial so you can confirm your photos look the way you want on your own TV before you’re charged. Cancel any time in the first week and you won’t pay anything.

Yes. You provide a payment method when you start the 7-day trial, but nothing is charged during the trial, and our payment provider (Polar) emails you before it ends so the first charge is expected. Unless you cancel first, the subscription then renews automatically each period, yearly or monthly depending on what you chose, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time, during the trial or after, from the billing portal linked on your account page. Click the Manage subscription button. Cancel during the trial and you’re never charged; cancel a paid subscription and it stays active until the end of the period you’ve already paid for, then doesn’t renew.

This happens in your browser, not on the TV. Go to cloudframe.tv/account, create your account with a Microsoft sign-in, and grant read-only access to your photos. Your Roku never contacts Microsoft and never asks for a password. There’s no typing a password one letter at a time with the remote.

It has to be a personal Microsoft account: the everyday kind you use for consumer OneDrive, like an outlook.com, hotmail.com, or live.com address (or any address you’ve made into a Microsoft account). Work or school accounts aren’t supported, which also means no OneDrive for Business and no SharePoint. If you try to sign in with a work or school address, Microsoft’s own sign-in page is what stops you, saying it couldn’t find a Microsoft account for it. Use your personal account instead.

CloudFrame TV shows the photos in your own OneDrive. It doesn’t play videos; they’re skipped rather than shown. It also doesn’t reach into files or folders that other people have shared with you, so only the photos in your own drive appear. Everything else in your OneDrive that isn’t an image is simply left alone.

Open CloudFrame TV on your Roku and choose Sign in. Enter your email on the TV; we send you a one-time code, and you type that code back on the TV to finish signing in. Everything happens on the television, so there is nothing to scan and no code to copy from the TV to another device. You can sign in on as many TVs as you like and remove any of them from your account page later. You can also sign a TV out from the settings page inside our Roku app.

We can’t change, move, or delete anything in your OneDrive. We ask only for read-only access, so we can show your photos and create a metadata catalog for quick access. We don’t keep copies of your photos. Photos stream from OneDrive to your TV as you watch. You can disconnect at any time from your account page, and you can revoke access entirely from your Microsoft account’s app permissions page.

Your TVs stop showing photos from your OneDrive library, and the catalog we built of it is cleared. Nothing in your actual OneDrive is affected. We only ever read it. Casting from your phone keeps working for free, with or without a subscription.

CloudFrame Ambient is a free companion app that turns your OneDrive photos into your Roku’s screensaver. The photo frame built into the CloudFrame TV app runs while the app is open; CloudFrame Ambient goes a step further and takes over whenever the whole TV sits idle, the way any Roku screensaver does. It shows the same library you already connected in the app, so there’s nothing extra to set up beyond adding it and picking it as your screensaver.

Search for CloudFrame Ambient in the Roku Channel Store and add it; it’s free, like the main app, and available on Roku in the United States. Then choose it on the Roku under Settings › Theme › Screensavers, the same list where your other screensavers live. That menu also sets how long the TV waits before the screensaver starts. There is no sign-in and no settings inside CloudFrame Ambient itself; everything it shows comes from the CloudFrame TV app.

No on both counts. CloudFrame Ambient reads the account the CloudFrame TV app is already signed in to on that TV, so you connect OneDrive once, in the app, and the screensaver follows. It shows your photos whenever your CloudFrame account has an active plan. Before you’ve signed in on that TV, or if the plan isn’t active, it shows a calm CloudFrame screen rather than photos; that is its intended resting state, not an error.

At most once a minute. On the screensaver each photo stays up for a minimum of 60 seconds before the next one drifts in, even when you’ve chosen a quicker pace. The photo frame inside the CloudFrame TV app is more flexible and can change as often as every 10 or 30 seconds; the screensaver holds to a one-minute floor on purpose, since it runs unattended and a calmer pace suits it. You pick the interval in the app under Ambient dwell time, and the screensaver uses your choice whenever it’s a minute or longer.

That calm branded screen appears when CloudFrame Ambient can’t yet find photos to show. The usual reasons: the CloudFrame TV app isn’t signed in on that TV, the account doesn’t have an active plan yet, or no OneDrive library is connected. Open the CloudFrame TV app on the same TV, sign in, and make sure your plan is active and your OneDrive is connected. The screensaver then picks up your photos on its own the next time it comes on.

That’s your Roku’s own screensaver doing what it does everywhere else on the device: taking over after the remote has been idle for a while, usually five minutes. We have deliberately left it alone rather than override a setting you chose. Press any button on the remote and your photos come straight back. The cast has been running the whole time and nothing was lost.

If you’d rather it didn’t interrupt, the timing lives on the Roku itself rather than in this app: Settings › System › Theme › Screensaver start time. That menu sets the delay and also offers Disable screensaver. Roku moves these menus between software versions, so the path may be different on your device.

Up to an hour, and the TV puts a notice on screen for the last five minutes of it. When it ends, press Back and start a new cast. The old code stops working and the TV shows a fresh one. The limit is deliberate: casting is meant to be temporary, and an hour is also the longest anything you send can survive on our side.

Fifty in one session. You don’t have to choose them all at once. Send a few, then tap Add more photos to keep going while the cast is still up. The phone tells you when the TV is full.

Yes. Press * on the remote to open Options, then Dwell time: 5 seconds (the default), 10, 20, 30, or a minute. The same menu pauses the slideshow or ends the cast, and Play/Pause on the remote pauses it too — useful when somebody wants to talk about one photo.

New arrivals join the end of the loop so that whatever is on screen gets its full time. They come round shortly. One thing worth knowing: once you use ← or → to browse by hand, the slideshow leaves the running order to you for the rest of that cast. It keeps advancing on its own, but new photos no longer jump the queue.

The code didn’t match a cast that’s currently running. Codes are eight characters and are shown on the TV under Cast from your phone. Check it against the screen — and if the TV has since been switched off or returned to the home screen, that code is already gone. Open Cast on the TV again for a new one.

The session finished while the page was open: somebody pressed Back on the remote, the hour ran out, or the TV stopped responding. Open Cast on the TV again and use the new code.

The TV couldn’t reach us for around half a minute, which almost always means its internet connection dropped. Press Back, check the Roku’s network connection, and start a new cast.

The TV had no working internet connection when you opened the Cast screen, so it never got a code to show you. Check the Roku’s network under Settings › Network, then try again.

Nearly always this is HEIC, the format iPhones use by default. Every browser on an iPhone or iPad opens HEIC without trouble, including Chrome and Firefox, since on Apple’s devices they are all Safari underneath. Casting HEIC images from an iPhone normally just works. Away from Apple devices, it goes the other way: Chrome, Firefox, and Samsung Internet cannot open HEIC at all, so an HEIC photo saved onto an Android phone or a computer, or sent to you by an iPhone owner, will fail there. The site displays how many photos were affected when this happens.

The fix is to send a JPEG or PNG instead. On an iPhone, Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible makes new photos JPEG from then on. Photos that fail this way never leave your phone.

Photos stored in iCloud or Google Photos rather than on the phone itself have to be downloaded before they can be sent, and your phone does that quietly in the background before handing them over. A large selection of cloud-stored photos can take a while. Photos already on the device go almost immediately.

They are deleted, at whichever of these comes first:

• the moment you press Back to leave the Cast screen;
• about a minute after the TV stops responding. This covers pressing Home, switching the TV off, or losing power;
• one hour after the cast started, in any case.

They are never added to a library, never backed up, and never kept for later. Once they’re gone we cannot get them back for you, so please don’t use casting as a way to store anything. The privacy policy sets all of this out in full.

Yes. Each photo is encrypted with its own key before it is written to storage, and that key exists only inside the temporary session record. Ending a session destroys the key and makes the photo permanently unreadable, before the file itself is even swept away.

This is not end-to-end encryption. Our server handles each image in order to deliver it to your TV. The copy sitting in storage between your phone and the TV cannot be readily read by us. The privacy policy says the same thing at greater length.

Anyone holding the pairing code, or able to see the QR code on the screen, can send photos to that TV.

The code only works while the Cast screen is open. Pressing Back ends it immediately, and codes are drawn at random from a space far too large to guess. But if the code is on a screen strangers can see, they can use it.

The code works in one direction only: it sends, it doesn’t fetch. Nobody holding it can see the photos already sent to that TV. Reading the photos takes a separate key that only your TV is given, and that never appears on screen. Someone with the code can add to what’s showing, but they can’t take a copy of it.

No. We don’t view them, scan them, index them, analyze them, or use them to train anything. There is no advertising in the app and no tracking on this site.