The app that sends your photos to SimoneBox in thirty seconds

The SimoneBox has two faces. The one Simone sees — the screen in the living room, the photos scrolling by, the radio. And the one we use, scattered 800 km away: a web application accessible from any phone, that lets us be present without Simone having to do anything at all.

I built this application myself, with one precise goal: for anyone in the family to be able to send a photo to my mother in under thirty seconds. No more. Because if it takes too long, you don't do it every day. And if you don't do it every day, the tablet stops feeling alive.

Thirty seconds — not one more

That number isn't a marketing claim. It's a design constraint I set for myself from the start.

Here's the real stopwatch: I unlock my phone, open my browser, type the tablet's address, the page loads instantly. I find the photo in my gallery, select it, tap "Send". Ten seconds later, the Raspberry Pi has received it, converted it, filed it. Twenty seconds after that, the slideshow has detected it and added it to the next cycle. Total: under thirty seconds end to end.

If that limit were two minutes, I wouldn't send photos every day. Nobody would. And frequency is what matters — not the technology.

One button. That's it.

I made a deliberate decision: this app had to be as simple as the tablet itself. Simone doesn't know how her tablet works, and that's perfect. The same way, the family shouldn't need to understand the app to use it.

So I stripped out everything that wasn't essential. No account. No password. No sign-up. Open the link, see a button, choose a photo, it's sent. My mother herself can use it — and that's the real test.

The goal wasn't to build a beautiful app. It was to build an app that nobody would ever need to learn how to use.

This level of simplicity is possible because the app runs on a completely closed network. No need to authenticate: if you can access the page, you're in the circle of trust. That point deserves attention.

Closed to the internet, open to intimacy

The app is not accessible from the internet. Nothing is exposed. It only runs on Simone's local network — and from outside, only via a VPN I set up on the Raspberry Pi.

This choice isn't a technical constraint. It's a philosophy. Family photos don't pass through a server in America. They're not indexed. They will never be analysed by an algorithm. They go directly from the family's phone to Simone's screen, and nowhere else. I wrote a full article on this choice if you want to understand why it matters so much.

The VPN lets me access the app from Paris exactly as if I were in my mother's living room. For other family members without the VPN, the app is accessible from Simone's Wi-Fi when they visit. Either way, nothing leaves the family circle.

The 16:9 format — and the others

The SimoneBox screen is 16:9 — the standard format for modern televisions and monitors. A photo sent in 16:9 fills the screen edge to edge, no black bars, no cropping. That's the ideal format: the photo takes up the entire surface, like a poster.

But any format works. A portrait photo (vertical), a square Instagram photo, a panoramic image — all are fine. The tablet adapts and centres them. The result is less immersive than a full 16:9, but the photo remains perfectly readable and beautiful.

In practice: when I take a landscape photo with my iPhone, it's naturally 16:9. When I take a portrait, it's 9:16. Both arrive fine. But for the beautiful shots — a sunset, a landscape, a family dinner table — I think in 16:9 framing and the result is striking on screen.

The gallery — seeing what Simone sees

The archive — nothing gets lost

Over two years, Simone has seen hundreds of photos scroll by. Some come back with the seasons — Christmas photos in December, holiday photos in summer. Archives make that possible without ever losing anything.

Controlling the tablet remotely

What you don't see — and that matters just as much

A notification with every upload. When someone sends a photo, a notification arrives on my phone. Not to track who sends what — just to know the tablet received it, that everything is working. In two years, I've never had to go check manually.

The purge, for a fresh start. A few times a year, we do a clean sweep: all active photos move at once into the archive. The gallery starts empty again, ready for a new season. Ten seconds to archive everything. The archive keeps track of it all.

No app to install. The choice to build a web app — rather than a mobile app — is what made SimoneBox usable by the whole family. My mother, my two brothers, my sisters-in-law, my nieces: everyone accesses the same link, from whatever browser they already have on their phone. No updates, no compatibility issues, no App Store.

In summary

I built this app for myself as much as for my family. So that sending a photo to my mother is never a chore, never something that requires effort or time. So it becomes a reflex — as natural as sending her a message.

What matters isn't the technology behind it. It's that one of my nieces sends a photo from her phone — a family meal, a moment from her day — and Simone sees it appear in her living room a few seconds later, without even knowing that her granddaughter just thought of her.

If you want to understand how everything fits together on the tablet side, the features article covers what Simone sees every day. For the story of the project from the beginning, it's all on the home page. And if this project speaks to you, the survey is the best place to start.