Release Notes and What's New

ReleaseOct 7, 2026

LumiFrame started with an iPad nobody was using. Plenty of those iPads are older than the app was willing to run on, so this release opens the door to them.

#iPadOS 15.5 and later

LumiFrame now runs on iPhone and iPad from iOS and iPadOS 15.5, so an iPad that has been sitting in a drawer for a few years can become a frame again. Signing in with a passkey and recognizing people in your photos still need iOS 16 or later; on older devices you sign in another way, and everything else works the same.

#A day from another year

When your phone's own library holds photos from this date in past years, Home can bring that day back as "Another year". You choose which frames show it, and they show that day only. A frame playing Rediscover takes in each morning's day by itself and says which day the photograph is from.

#Home says it plainly

The note at the top of Home now reads like a person wrote it: it names the people you shared the week with. Naming the people in your photos is quicker on devices that support people recognition.

#Steadier underneath

Every notification opens exactly what it names. A phone that could not be reached no longer stops the same notification from reaching your other devices. Stopping a TV cast never freezes the phone. An open album takes in new uploads and deletions without a refresh, and the logo stays centered as the app finishes starting.

Thank you for giving that old iPad another job. It has been waiting for one.

ReleaseSep 29, 2026

LumiFrame had grown the way apps do: a button here drawn one way, a text field there drawn another, a filter bar and a toolbar that sat in the same place and looked like strangers. This release puts all of it under one light.

#One glass, lit from above

Buttons, text fields, the choose-one controls, filter bars, the people row in shared albums and the selection toolbar now share one material: a translucent glass, lit from directly above, with an edge that catches that light at the top and settles into shadow at the base. When photos scroll beneath a bar, the bar lifts and thickens so its labels stay easy to read. Tags that only tell you something went flat, so the things you can press are the things that look pressable.

#Photos that travel

Tap a photo or a video anywhere in the app, in an album, on your Home screen, in Favorites, in the activity feed, on a profile or in a notification, and it glides from exactly where it sat into full screen, then back to the same spot when you close it.

#A new icon

The LumiFrame play mark is lit the same way now, and the app icon gives it room to breathe on a dark indigo tile. On iPhone it has dark and tinted versions for your Home Screen, and on Android 13 and later it follows your themed icons. Android notifications show the LumiFrame mark in the status bar too.

#Smaller things

Frame cards on Home and in Frames change color the moment you switch themes, without a restart. The round buttons at the top of the screen are single, clean circles. Notifications carry your theme's color, and a handful of shadows that drew a faint second edge are gone.

Thank you for spending time with your memories in LumiFrame. We hope it feels like one place now.

ReleaseSep 4, 2026

Adding photos to LumiFrame used to start with a question from your phone: may this app see your whole library? For most people, most of the time, the honest answer is "just these few". This release makes that the first choice, not the fallback.

#Your phone's own picker, nothing more

Tap Add and LumiFrame now asks how you want to add. Choose Photos & Videos opens Apple Photos on iPhone and iPad, or the Photo Picker on Android, and you pick exactly the items you mean. LumiFrame receives those files and only those files. It never asks for access to the rest of your library, and the copies it keeps while uploading are cleared as soon as each upload finishes.

#Whole albums, still one tap

Import Entire Album is the other door. It opens LumiFrame's own album browser, the one you already know, and adds albums in full. If the picker cannot open for any reason, the app says so and offers the album route instead of leaving you on a blank screen.

#Since 1.10

The browser upload we introduced last release had two rough edges on the first try: the file dialog could leave the page waiting, and the picked pictures drew as broken tiles on Chrome and Edge. Both are fixed, along with comments, invitations and upload notices sent from the web app, which browsers were quietly refusing.

Thank you for adding your memories on your own terms. The right amount of access is exactly the photos you meant to share.

ReleaseSep 3, 2026

LumiFrame has always lived on your phone and your frames. The web app was a way to look. This release makes it a place to work, and it makes every screen of the app faster to reach the thing you came for.

#Your browser is now an upload button

Open app.lumiframeapp.com, pick photos straight from your computer, and they land in your albums the same way they do from your phone. Videos come too: a clip of up to a minute uploads in pieces, survives a dropped connection, and picks up where it left off when you choose the same file again. What you already had on your laptop is no longer stuck there.

#The web app got quicker on its feet

On Chrome and Edge the app now runs as WebAssembly, which cuts the time from opening the tab to the first screen roughly in half and leaves far less work on the browser's main thread. Settings and developer screens load only when you open them, fonts ship with the app instead of being fetched, and album covers and the Home collage draw from right-sized images rather than full originals. Wide windows get a proper layout, with your content in a readable column and the same backdrop from edge to edge.

#Loading looks like what is coming

Spinners are gone. While an album, a frame card, a comment thread or a notification loads, you see the shape of the thing itself, lit in your theme's own colours, and it fills in as the data arrives. Nothing says "No comments yet" before it has read the comments.

#Steadier where it counts

Your sign-in session now lives in the phone's keychain and the app's passcode is stored more securely. Shuffle plays every photo before any repeat. A frame that has gone away no longer stalls the app that remembered it, casting cancels cleanly, and albums, moderation and account deletion all recover more gracefully from the edge cases we found. Plus the usual round of fixes across events, sharing and the slideshow.

Thank you for bringing LumiFrame onto one more screen. The best frame is the one that was already open.

ReleaseAug 15, 2026

An event should feel alive while it is happening, not turn into an album everyone checks the next morning. This release brings the room into the frame as people add to it.

#New photos join the show

Keep the slideshow running while guests upload. Their photos can now appear without stopping, restarting, or refreshing anything, and the event activity view moves with the room too. On the web, guests can see new arrivals as they happen instead of wondering whether an upload worked.

#The ending is yours to set

Some hosts want uploads to close when the night ends. Others want to leave the door open for the photos people remember on the way home. You can now choose an afterglow from one hour to three days, and LumiFrame keeps the event, its recap, and its guest access in step with that choice.

Guests can return to the event later without starting over, and reusable invitations make it easier to welcome the same people back. Events are easier to reach from the album library, with a clearer home for what is happening now and what has already happened.

#Smoother everywhere else

Activity keeps photos and videos in their proper shape as you scroll. Albums and invitations recover more cleanly when a connection stumbles. Media loads more reliably, and slideshows are steadier across phones, tablets, and dedicated frames.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. The best event album is the one everyone can watch becoming a memory together.

ReleaseAug 9, 2026

Your plan has always been described in frames. Until now the app quietly counted installs instead. This release makes the two agree, and gives your frames something to show for themselves.

Sign in on as many phones, tablets and laptops as you like, and control any frame from any of them. What your plan counts is frames, the screens actually showing your photos, so pressing Play on a new device simply offers to make it one. Nobody's current setup changes, and if you ever switch plans you get a week's notice before anything pauses.

#Your frames have something to show

Frame Insights now runs on what your frames really played instead of sitting empty. See hours of light and photos shown across every frame by week, month or year, and tap any one of them for its own history. On Android, Frame Mode lets a dedicated tablet make LumiFrame its home screen, so it comes back to your photos on its own after a reboot. And a frame that quietly dies now admits it is offline rather than insisting all is well.

#Notifications that leave you alone

You are no longer buzzed about something you just did on the device in your hand. Deleting a notification clears it everywhere at once, and the feed stops quietly refilling with older ones each time you come back to it.

#Quicker, and steadier

Adding photos LumiFrame already has is dramatically faster: it recognises them and skips the work. You can now rename your devices, mute a particular frame's alerts, and see everything signed in from account settings. Plus the usual round of fixes, including gentler battery use, better browser Back on the web, and a few quieter holes closed around sharing, events and storage limits.

ReleaseAug 5, 2026

#Your library stops reloading itself

Open an album, go back, open it again: the photos are simply there. LumiFrame used to discard the thumbnails it had just prepared every time you changed screens, then rebuild them on the way back. It keeps them now, and large albums scroll more smoothly for the same reason.

#Nothing blinks anymore

Photos no longer flash the first time you open them full screen, and videos hold their poster until there is a frame to play. Where a picture has not arrived yet, you get a soft blurred impression of it rather than an empty box.

#Lighter on a slow connection

Album covers now use a small version of the photo instead of the full-size original, and a long browse is interrupted far less often to re-check your access. On the web, pictures you have already seen come straight from your browser.

Long albums have a back-to-top button too.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. This release is mostly invisible, which is rather the point: the photos should already be there when you look.

NewsAug 1, 2026

When a slideshow stops or a photo will not upload, the first question is always the same: is it me, or is it them. There is now a page that answers it. status.lumiframeapp.com shows whether each part of LumiFrame is up, checked every three minutes from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.

#What it covers

Nine services, named for what they do rather than what they run on:

Website - lumiframeapp.com itself
Sign-in & Accounts - logging in and creating accounts
Live Event Access - guests opening an event link
Slideshow & Playback - serving photos and videos to your frames
Remote Frame Control - sending a command from one device to another
Sharing Links - the guest links you send to people
File Storage - where uploaded photos and videos live
Database - albums, members and settings
Community - the forum

If any of them goes down, the page says so on its own, without waiting for someone to write a note. It also keeps the history, so you can look back at a bad afternoon and see what actually happened.

The link lives in the footer of every page on this site, under Support. Worth a bookmark before you need it, not after.

NewsJul 31, 2026

The hard part of LumiFrame was never the setup. It is knowing what to do first. So there is now a short course that comes to you, and a forum to ask in when it does not cover your case.

#Seven emails, seven days

Confirm your email address when you sign up and the first part arrives straight away. One more each day after that:

What LumiFrame is for
Turning your first device into a frame
Albums, and how they decide what a frame shows
The slideshow, and how to shape it
Letting other people add to it
Running an event
Where to get help

None of it is gated. Everything is already in the app, and the course only tells you what is worth doing on day one. The unsubscribe link drops the course and nothing else, so your event and activity notifications carry on as before.

#Somewhere to ask

The last email points at the community forum. It is new, and mostly empty, which is the only honest thing to say about a forum on its first week. It is where the questions go: Help for setup, Show & Tell for what people build, Feature Requests to suggest and to vote, Bug Reports for things that are broken, Announcements for release notes.

Deeper written guides live at lumiframeapp.com/guides, and there is always [email protected] if you would rather not post in public.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow.

ReleaseJul 29, 2026

#Home that knows whose memories these are

The Home hero now speaks from your library, with your photographs behind the words. The collage only ever shows media you own - never a co-contributor's - and an established library is never treated as empty just because a refresh is still catching up.

Tap a moment and it opens as its own page, then brings you back where you left off. No more dropping into the wrong tab, or opening a sheet whose photo never arrives. The quiet line stays quiet while your library settles, and the hero keeps its collage through brief refresh gaps instead of blinking blank.

Magic-link emails now open LumiFrame on Android the way they already did on iOS, instead of stranding you in a browser with nothing useful to do. The callback page waits for a real tap when it needs one, and if the app is not on that device it says so plainly and points you to the store. Password recovery is tighter, and the sign-in callback wears Lumi Classic again.

#Frames that tell you when they are away

Press Play on a frame that is offline and LumiFrame says so right away - naming the frame and explaining that playback will work again once it reconnects - instead of waiting out a timeout and calling it a hiccup.

#Keys that actually get returned

Removing a contributor now cancels their pending invites instead of leaving a door ajar. Someone shown the door from an Album Event can no longer upload or finish the night. Turning off notifications for a post works on the second tap as well as the first. And deleting an account cancels any invites that would otherwise follow a reused email.

#Steadier underneath

No ads, ever - the last dormant ad machinery is gone, and the premium invitation sits quietly at the end of Activity rather than between your memories. More of the small chrome animations honor reduced motion. Guest uploads count toward the host's storage the way they always should have. Photos you delete stay deleted instead of racing a re-attach into a broken image. Account switches and abrupt sign-outs leave less behind for the next person on the device.

Long photo and video uploads to LumiFrame, guest uploads, and offline downloads now keep making progress when you switch apps or lock your screen. LumiFrame hands active transfers to iOS and Android, checks every finished file before accepting it, and safely picks work back up when you return.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. Home should open on something true, and only ever on what is yours.

ReleaseJul 25, 2026

Every photo arrives carrying more than pixels - where it was taken, when it was really taken, and which way up it belongs. LumiFrame had been quietly losing all three somewhere between your library and your album. This release gets them back, and gives event hosts the control they need while the room is still full.

#Your photos keep their place and their date

Photos you add now hold on to the place they were taken and the moment the camera actually recorded it, instead of the day your phone happened to file it away. Photos shot sideways or upside down arrive the right way up rather than being flattened into the wrong orientation on the way in. Videos show their length on the album grid again. And an upload can no longer be turned away outright because your plan and our servers briefly disagreed about it - it quietly falls back and still saves.

#Hosting an event, with the room in hand

Album Events now have the moderation a host actually needs. Owners and admins can take down any photo in the event, choosing whether it simply leaves this album or goes everywhere, and guests can still remove their own. Anyone can be shown the door without their photos leaving with them.

The quieter fixes matter just as much: guests whose upload window has closed are now genuinely seen out instead of lingering with access, removing a contributor cuts their event access right away rather than at the end of the night, joining an event lands you in the role you were actually given, and the PIN screen counts wrong attempts properly so the lockout it always promised finally engages.

#Steadier underneath

Your albums, frames, and pending transfers save more reliably. Overlapping saves used to race each other and quietly lose, which is the kind of thing you would only notice much later, as something you set that simply was not there.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. A photo should remember where it has been, and an evening should belong to whoever is hosting it.

ReleaseJul 22, 2026

A release focused on privacy, security, and everyday reliability.

Switching accounts, signing out, or handing off your device no longer risks one person's photos, albums, events, or slideshows showing up for someone else. Account deletion now fully removes your data across every service we use, not just our own database, and two-factor sign-in is now optional instead of required. Your photos and videos also keep their original metadata when you add them.

Plus a round of fixes: a steadier slideshow start, theme choices that stay in sync across your devices, consistent photo selection everywhere, and cleaner trial handling.

ReleaseJul 20, 2026

Shared albums were always built for more than one person - but only one person could ever really own them. If that person stepped away, or simply wanted someone else to take the reins, the album had nowhere to go. This release gives it somewhere to go, and spends the rest of its time making the everyday moments around LumiFrame feel a little steadier.

#Hand the album to someone else

Every shared album now has a real way to change hands. An owner can request a transfer to any contributor who has already accepted their invite. The recipient reviews the album and storage responsibility before accepting, and nothing changes until they do. Once accepted, the album carries on under its new owner without missing a memory, while the previous owner becomes an admin. You'll find the request next to each contributor in Manage Access, or through the album selection toolbar.

#Guided tours that don't get stuck

The tutorial overlays that walk new users through LumiFrame now know how to recover instead of stalling. If a step can't complete the way it expects, the tour moves itself forward instead of leaving you stranded partway through. Photo library access is also detected more accurately, so LumiFrame no longer misreads a limited selection as no access at all.

#Steadier scrolling and syncing

Scrolling back through a large album should now feel instant instead of reloading from scratch, and Home does a better job refreshing your frames, albums, and activity at once, so what you see is always caught up, even if a request along the way has a rough moment.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. Small as it is, handing off an album is exactly the kind of thing that should have always just worked.

ReleaseJul 18, 2026

A polish release that follows quickly on v1.5 - honest feedback while your memories upload, and a day spent inside LumiFrame's themes bringing each one closer to the real thing it was always meant to evoke.

#See your uploads land

When you add photos to a live event, the event screen now shows them right away - with live progress for each memory as it uploads from your device. No more wondering whether that batch from the barbecue actually made it: you watch them arrive, and anything that needs a retry is one tap away.

#Your themes just learned to breathe

If you have a favorite theme, it just got a little more transporting.

Champagne now truly sparkles - delicate trails of bubbles rise and catch the light exactly the way they do in a freshly poured glass. Ember carries real fire: tiny incandescent sparks drift up from the warmth below, some blazing bright, some cooling to a soft red glow, like sitting close to a campfire with photos in hand. Cosmic became a true night sky, with thousands of faint stars behind the bright ones and the gentle band of the Milky Way sweeping behind glowing nebulas. Solar keeps its dramatic eclipse - now with a luminous ring and a subtle golden flare, like looking up at something rare. And Velvet settles into quiet luxury: deep red folds of fabric that hold the light softly.

Every refinement follows one rule - the beauty stays in the background, and your memories stay in front. Nothing glitters where it would distract; everything glows where it welcomes.

#Clearer, more honest moments

Passcode protection now tells you plainly when it needs an upgraded plan instead of quietly failing, tutorial steps match the buttons actually on screen, and the guest display, sign-in, and media library all picked up small refinements that make everyday actions feel more dependable.

Pick a theme, pour something bubbly, and let your memories do the rest.

ReleaseJul 17, 2026

This is one of LumiFrame's biggest updates yet. The experience has been thoughtfully redesigned from top to bottom to feel more beautiful, cohesive, and effortless every time you open it.

#A more cohesive LumiFrame

Albums, activity, frames, settings, and live events now share a clearer visual language. Refined layouts, more intentional lighting, richer depth, and beautifully balanced themes bring every part of the app into the same world.

#Easier to move through

Navigation, menus, selection, and everyday actions have been reworked to feel more natural and predictable. Important controls are easier to find, while your photos and memories stay at the center of the experience.

#Polished in every detail

Loading states, motion, accessibility, and layouts across phones and tablets have all been improved. The app also feels smoother and more responsive, with countless small refinements that make LumiFrame calmer and more enjoyable to use.

We hope this new chapter makes revisiting and sharing your memories feel more special than ever.

ReleaseJul 15, 2026

This release brings a more thoughtful feel to LumiFrame, with a refreshed home and a smoother way to move through the memories you care about.

#A home that feels more like yours

The home experience has been reworked to make your albums, frames, activity, and shared memories easier to find. Cleaner layouts, clearer actions, and a more polished visual rhythm help LumiFrame feel welcoming every time you open it.

#More confidence in your account

Signing in and protecting your account is now more dependable. Multi-step verification, passkeys, password recovery, and account settings have all been tightened up so you can get back to your memories with fewer interruptions and more peace of mind.

#Smoother everyday moments

We also improved activity updates, album browsing, notifications, and the small details across the app. Buttons, cards, menus, and feedback are clearer and more consistent, so everyday actions take less effort.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. We hope this update makes the app feel a little more like home.

ReleaseJul 12, 2026

This release is all about making LumiFrame feel calmer and more dependable as your library grows.

#Smoother uploads

Adding a large group of photos and videos is now much more reliable. Uploads keep moving at a steady pace, recover more gracefully when something goes wrong, and give you clearer feedback about what was added and what still needs attention. If an upload does fail, it is easier to try again without starting over.

#Better memories, wherever you are

LumiFrame now does a better job of preserving the quality of your memories, while uploads can continue more smoothly when you switch away from the app or move on to something else. The upload queue has also been refined so it can coordinate a busy batch more intelligently.

#Albums that keep up

Large albums are easier to browse, and album limits are explained more clearly when you reach them. You should spend less time wondering what happened and more time enjoying the memories you added.

#Spotlight tutorials, fixed

We also reworked the Spotlight tutorial experience and fixed critical issues that could prevent the helpful tutorial overlay from appearing under certain conditions. Guidance should now show up when you need it, right where you expect it.

Thank you for helping LumiFrame grow. More thoughtful improvements are on the way.

LaunchJul 11, 2026

LumiFrame is now live on Google Play. Android joins iOS as a fully supported platform, so any phone, tablet, or spare device can become a frame.

Head to Google Play to download LumiFrame and get started.

LaunchJul 6, 2026

LumiFrame is now live on the Apple App Store. This marks the first public release of the app - available today for iOS, with Android to follow.

Head to the App Store to download LumiFrame and get started.

AlphaJun 17, 2026

After several feature-heavy sprints, this one was deliberately about hardening - the same kind of dedicated stability pass as α 0.12, now that the surface area is far larger. No new headline feature; just making everything already built more reliable, more consistent, and more honest under bad conditions.

#Offline resilience

Library snapshot - The app keeps a local snapshot of your library so opening it offline shows your albums and recent media immediately, rather than a spinner waiting on a network that isn't there.

Graceful degradation across screens - A sweep of the main screens replaced "blank or broken when offline" with calm, explanatory states. Knowing why something is empty - "you're offline" versus "nothing here yet" - is the difference between a bug and a considered experience.

#Race-condition hardening

A focused audit of the app's optimistic writes - the places where the UI updates instantly before the server confirms (favourites, hearts, invites). The core primitives held up well, but several optimistic paths lacked a per-item in-flight guard, so a fast double-tap could fire two competing writes. Those paths now use the same guarded pattern, so the screen and the server can't disagree.

#One consistent notification surface

Every toast and snackbar in the app now renders through a single shared surface with the same frosted-glass chrome as the live-event activity toast - dropping in from the top, tinted by meaning (green for success, red for error, amber for warning), and sliding out gracefully instead of popping. Previously these were a patchwork of styles. Now a confirmation, an error, and a "Maya added a photo" all feel like the same product speaking with one voice.

#Measuring what matters

Analytics instrumentation was put on a proper footing this sprint, with a clear separation of concerns:

The database remains the source of truth for anything that affects billing, usage, or limits - never an analytics tool.
Behavioural funnels (activation, upgrades, credit-pack purchases) flow to a product-analytics layer keyed only by an anonymous user ID - never email, never media, never invite links or PINs.
Errors continue to flow to crash reporting.

The privacy line is firm: nothing about what you share - no media, no filenames, no tokens - ever leaves for analytics. Only how the product is used, so it can be made better.

#Where things stand

Alpha continues. The product is broad and increasingly solid, and the work now is less about adding and more about deepening - making each existing feature feel inevitable. More to come.

AlphaJun 3, 2026

The slideshow engine (α 0.5) has shown one photo at a time since day one. This sprint taught it to compose - and made sure it looks identical no matter what screen it's playing on.

#Smart Layout

Multi-photo mosaics - Smart Layout shows two to four photos at once, packed by orientation: a tall portrait beside a stack of landscapes, a balanced quad, a pair of verticals as columns. It advances group-by-group instead of photo-by-photo, so a wall of memories breathes the way a real photo collage does.

It's aspect-aware, not a fixed template - The planner scores candidate arrangements against the actual shape of the frame and picks the largest group whose worst-cropped photo still shows enough to be worth showing. Portraits tile as columns; a frame-filling 16:9 shot plays solo rather than getting butchered to fit a grid. Videos always play full-screen on their own.

Tunable per frame - Turn it on per frame and set the maximum photos per group (2-4). Off by default; the classic one-at-a-time slideshow is unchanged.

#Casting parity

This was the harder half. LumiFrame plays on this device, on remote LumiFrame devices, and cast to Chromecast, AirPlay, and Smart TVs - and Smart Layout had to look right on all of them.

Mosaics on third-party receivers - A Chromecast can't run our layout engine, so each mosaic group is composed into a single 1920×1080 image on the device and served to the receiver as one frame. The receiver just plays a slideshow; the intelligence happens before it gets there.

AirPlay advance, rebuilt - AirPlay timing was a long-standing source of drift - the app's timer and the receiver's player ran on independent clocks, causing index desync and prematurely-skipped videos. The receiver is now the source of truth for slide timing: it reports each advance, and the app realigns to it. The app-side timer was demoted to a stall watchdog that only steps in if the receiver queue dries up.

#Honest limitations

A couple of rough edges are documented rather than hidden:

On AirPlay, a mosaic currently lingers a little longer than a single slide would, because AirPlay advances per-photo while a mosaic represents several. The image is correct; the cadence isn't perfect yet. A group-aware fix is on the list.
Smart Layout looks best on photos that carry their dimensions in metadata (on-device photos do) - cloud photos missing that data are measured on the fly and the layout settles a beat later, gliding rather than snapping into place.

Calling these out is the point. They're real, they're known, and they're tracked.

AlphaMay 20, 2026

Live events turned out to be the feature people got most excited about - which raised a real question. Hosting an event has a real cost (storage, delivery, moderation), and "unlimited everything" isn't honest for a product that intends to last. This sprint built a usage model that's fair, transparent, and impossible to fudge.

Current note: exact allowances, credit pack contents, and pricing live on /pricing and evolve over time. This entry describes the mechanism, not the numbers.

#What shipped

Event credits - Paid tiers include a monthly allowance of events. Need more than your plan includes in a given month? Buy a credit pack. Credits are consumed when an event is created, and your remaining allowance is always visible before you start one - no surprise mid-event wall.

Allowance, at a glance - A summary card shows where you stand: events used this month, events remaining, and any purchased credits on top. The number you see is the number the server will enforce - they're the same source.

Concurrency limits - Plans cap how many events can run at once, separate from the monthly count. The app distinguishes "you've hit your monthly limit" from "you already have an event running" and says which - because they call for completely different actions.

#Server-authoritative by design

The cardinal rule established this sprint: the client never counts. Every allowance, every credit balance, and every limit is owned by the server.

Event creation goes through a single atomic database function that checks the allowance, decrements the credit ledger, and creates the session in one transaction - so two devices can't both spend the last credit.
Purchases are reconciled through the store's server-to-server webhook, not a client receipt the app could be tricked into trusting.
The app's job is to display the state and explain it clearly. It is never the source of truth for anything you pay for.

#Why it's built this way

Billing logic that lives in the client is billing logic that can be bypassed. Putting the ledger, the limits, and the purchase reconciliation entirely server-side means the rules are the same for everyone and can't be gamed - which is the only way a usage model stays fair over time.

AlphaMay 6, 2026

The biggest friction in any shared event is the ask: "download this app first." This sprint removed it. Guests at a LumiFrame event can now join, view, and upload entirely from a web browser - no install, no account.

#What shipped

The /share event page - Every event generates a guest link (and the QR code that encodes it). Open it on any phone and you land on a live event page on lumiframeapp.com: the event's hero, a countdown to when the window closes, and the gallery.

Guest join with just a name - A guest enters a display name and they're in - that's the entire gate. They can optionally pick an avatar. No sign-up wall stands between a guest and contributing to the night.

Browser uploads - Guests add photos and videos straight from the web page. Everything they upload flows through the same moderation gate (α 0.23) and the same R2 media pipeline as in-app uploads - a guest on the web isn't a second-class, unchecked path.

The live experience, on the web - The web gallery isn't a static snapshot. It polls for new activity and grows as the event happens - the same photos appearing on the host's frame appear in the guest's browser, with a live activity strip showing who just contributed and a countdown that genuinely ticks down.

#Why this matters

An event album is only as good as the photos it collects, and you collect the most when contributing is effortless. The web path means the cousin who'll never install another app, the friend on Android at an iPhone-heavy party, and the guest whose phone is nearly full can all still add their shot of the moment. The host gets a fuller story of the event; the guest does almost nothing.

#Under the hood

The share site is a statically-exported web client that talks to the same Supabase backend and edge functions the app uses, so an event behaves identically whether you're looking at it through the app or a browser tab. Guest identity is scoped to the event - a guest name lets you contribute to that event, and nothing else.

Next: with events driving real usage, it was time to make the economics of hosting them clear and fair.

AlphaApr 22, 2026

Event albums shipped quietly back in α 0.18b - a time-limited album with a QR code for guests. They worked, but they were static: a place photos landed. This sprint turned them into something that feels alive while the event is happening.

#What shipped

Live activity toasts - While an event is running, the host and contributors see gentle toasts drop in from the top of the screen as photos arrive: "Maya added 3 photos." Tap one and it opens straight to what was just shared. It makes a party across the room feel present in your hand.

A growing live grid - The event album fills in real time. No pull-to-refresh - photos appear as guests upload them, with a soft arrival animation, so an event dashboard left open on a frame becomes a live mosaic of the night.

Event recap - When the window closes, the event doesn't just stop. A recap is generated - the highlights from everyone who contributed - so the morning after, there's something to look back on rather than a folder to sift through.

The "Live Event" border - Event albums are now unmistakable at a glance. Instead of a cluttered corner badge, a live album gets an accent border framing its cover with a label that breaks the top edge - ── LIVE EVENT ── in green while it's running, amber while the upload window is still open, slate once it's ended. During an active event, the card hides its other badges so the frame owns the card.

#Design decisions worth noting

The toast is contextual, not global. It only appears in the handful of places a live event is actually relevant - the album, the event dashboard, and the slideshow - rather than firing at you in Settings or an unrelated album. The slideshow stays in sync too: a photo a guest uploads can appear in the running show within seconds.

Safeguards against noise. A burst of uploads doesn't mean a burst of toasts. Per-contributor accumulation windows, cooldowns, and a global rolling rate cap keep the experience celebratory rather than spammy - the same restraint applied to push notifications back in α 0.7.

#What's next

Everything here lives inside the app. But the people at an event are holding their phones, not yours - and most of them don't have LumiFrame installed. The next sprint takes the live event experience to the open web.

AlphaApr 8, 2026

The moment you let people post text - and especially the moment you let guests without an account upload to an event album - you've taken on a responsibility. This sprint built the moderation and abuse-prevention layer so that LumiFrame can host conversations safely by default, not as an afterthought.

#Automated moderation

OpenAI moderation on every comment - Every comment is screened by OpenAI's moderation model before it's ever visible to anyone else. Hate, harassment, sexual content, and violence are caught automatically.

Fail-closed, not fail-open - This was the most important design decision of the sprint. If the moderation provider is configured but unreachable or erroring, a comment is held for review - never silently published. The safe default when the safety system is degraded is don't show it, not show it and hope.

Review queue - Held and rejected comments don't disappear into the void. They land in a moderation review queue that an administrator can list, approve, or dismiss. Nothing is lost, and a false positive can be released.

#Writes you can trust

Edge-function-only writes - Comments can no longer be written directly to the database from the client. Every comment post and edit routes through a dedicated edge function that runs moderation first. Direct database insert and update on the comments table were revoked entirely - there's no path that skips the check, including edits.

Rate limiting - Per-user write limits (a burst cap per minute and a ceiling per hour) are enforced server-side via a write-attempt ledger. Hitting the limit returns a clean "slow down" rather than letting a script flood an album.

GIF source restriction - The GIF picker only accepts URLs from a single trusted provider, and the picker itself requests a PG-13 content rating. There's no field for pasting an arbitrary image URL.

Idempotent posting - Each comment carries a request ID scoped to its author, so a retry on a flaky connection resolves to the one real comment instead of creating duplicates.

#Why build this now, not later

Moderation is the kind of system that's nearly impossible to retrofit safely once content is already flowing and write paths are scattered across the codebase. Building it before opening events to the public web (next sprint) means every guest upload and comment goes through the same gate from the very first one.

AlphaMar 25, 2026

Appreciation reactions (α 0.17) hinted at it; the relational backend (α 0.21) made it possible. This sprint built the full engagement layer - the conversations and reactions that turn a shared album from a folder into a place people come back to.

#What shipped

Comments on memories - Any contributor can comment on a photo or video in a shared album. Threads are lightweight and inline - a quick "this is my favourite from the whole trip", not a forum. Comments support text and a GIF picker.

Reactions and hearts - Beyond the quiet Appreciation, members can react to a memory with a heart. Reaction counts are visible to the people in the album, surfacing which moments resonated without turning it into a popularity contest.

The Activity Feed - A single chronological feed of everything happening across your albums: new photos added, comments posted, reactions given, new people joining. It's the answer to "what did I miss?" - open the app, see what moved since you last looked.

Notifications feed - Notifications are no longer fire-and-forget pushes that vanish. They now persist into an in-app feed you can scroll back through, mark as read, and act on, so a missed push is never a lost event.

#Under the hood

Engagement data lives in proper Postgres tables - activity_comments, reactions, and an engagement repository the app reads through a single native path. Because everything is relational now, the Activity Feed is one indexed query rather than the fan-out it would have been on the old document model.

Every write is guarded by Row-Level Security: you can only comment in albums you belong to, and you can only edit or delete your own comments.

#What this sets up

Opening comments to a household raises an obvious question: what happens when something inappropriate gets posted - especially in event albums where guests upload without an account? That's the entire focus of the next sprint.

AlphaMar 11, 2026

With the website live and the alpha feature set broad, this sprint paid down the biggest piece of architectural debt before layering on real-time social features: the backend moved from Firebase to Supabase and Postgres.

#Why migrate

Firebase was the right call on day one - it got identity, real-time data, and Cloud Functions working in days, not weeks. But as the data model matured, three problems kept recurring:

Relational queries. Albums, contributors, media, reactions, and comments are deeply relational. Modelling them in a document store meant fan-out reads and denormalised copies that were easy to get out of sync.
Server-authoritative rules. Enforcing tier limits, storage quotas, and event windows needed real transactions and constraints, not best-effort document rules.
Cost predictability. Per-document read pricing made some of the most useful screens (activity, event dashboards) the most expensive to build.

Postgres answers all three. The decision was made deliberately, not casually - a migration mid-alpha is exactly the kind of thing that's painful now and impossible later.

#What shipped

Postgres data model - Users, albums, media, contributors, frames, and subscriptions are now proper relational tables with foreign keys and constraints. The shapes that used to live in nested subcollections are now joins.

Row-Level Security from the start - Every table ships with RLS policies. A user can only read and write rows they own or have been explicitly granted access to. The same rules that the app relies on are enforced at the database, not in the client.

Edge functions for privileged writes - Anything that must not be client-trusted - tier assignment, quota enforcement, event sessions - moved behind edge functions running with service-role access. The client asks; the server decides.

Realtime over Postgres - Frames and the app subscribe to Postgres change streams instead of document listeners. The delta-only sync model from α 0.8 carried over cleanly.

Storage stays on Cloudflare R2 - Media delivery was already on R2 behind signed URLs and a CDN, and that pipeline was untouched. Only the metadata and identity layer moved.

#How it went

The migration ran behind a compatibility layer so the app could be cut over table-by-table rather than in one risky switch. Auth moved first, then the album/media core, then subscriptions. A full read/write parity pass was run against both backends before Firebase was retired for each domain.

Next: with a relational backend in place, the planned social engagement layer finally has the foundation it needs.

AlphaFeb 25, 2026

Today lumiframeapp.com went live - a proper home for LumiFrame on the web.

#What's on the site

Landing page - A page that explains what LumiFrame is, who it's for, and how it works. The same glassmorphism design language carries over from the app so it all feels like one product.

Account portal - Sign in at /account to see your profile, stats, and manage basic account settings. This is the first cross-platform web presence for LumiFrame accounts.

This changelog - Eight months of development, documented from concept to today, in one place.

#Cross-platform account sync

The web portal and the mobile app share the same Firebase auth backend. Profile photo, username, album count, and frame count from the app appear in the web portal automatically. Changes to display name on the web propagate to the app within the hour.

#What's next

Twenty sprints. Nine months. With the app, the backend, and now the web all in place, the next stretch of alpha is about depth - consolidating the foundation and building out the social, live-event, and playback features that make LumiFrame more than a photo viewer.

AlphaFeb 12, 2026

For the first time, LumiFrame is running on devices that aren't the development machine. A TestFlight build was pushed to a handful of personal devices to catch the things that only surface outside the simulator.

#What surfaced in testing

The headline finding: the first-run experience of setting up a frame and album was smooth, but there was no clear "pull" to come back the next day. The retention loop wasn't obvious enough, which immediately shaped priorities around activity notifications and the default album-assignment prompt.

#Bug fixes from real-device testing

Testing on physical hardware uncovered 43 issues that never appeared in the simulator. The most impactful:

Frame registration failed on certain Android 14 devices - A permissions change in Android 14 affected background network access during initial setup. Fixed.
Albums sticking after contributor removed - When a contributor was removed, their local copy of the album still appeared briefly. Firestore rules enforcement was correct; the local state management wasn't. Fixed.
Clock mode resuming at wrong brightness - Fixed a state restoration bug where display brightness set via the app wasn't persisted across frame reboots.
Invitations not delivered to some Gmail addresses - Firebase's email domain was triggering Gmail's spam filter. Resolved by configuring a custom sending domain.
Video audio playing on frames that should be muted - Frames default to muted per the spec, but a codec path for certain video formats bypassed the mute flag. Fixed.

#Sentry integration

Sentry was connected for crash reporting this sprint. Error capture is already paying dividends - several nil-dereference crashes that were low-frequency enough to have been missed in simulator testing are now captured and tracked.

AlphaFeb 6, 2026

This is the feature that opened up an entirely new way to use LumiFrame. Until now, albums were something you and the people you'd invited curated over time. Event albums are different: a shared album built for a single moment - a wedding, a birthday, a reunion - that anyone present can contribute to, even if they've never heard of LumiFrame.

#What shipped

Time-limited collaborative albums - Any album can be turned into an event album for a defined window. Set a duration (up to 7 days), optionally schedule when it starts, and optionally protect it with a PIN. When the window closes, the album quietly returns to a normal album - the memories stay, the open door doesn't.

Guest contribution by QR code - Converting an album generates a QR code and a share link. A guest scans it, and they can start adding photos and videos - no LumiFrame account required. The friction that kills most "send me your photos" group efforts simply isn't there.

Host controls - The owner stays in charge throughout: see who's contributing, watch photos arrive, set the PIN, and close the event early or extend it. Guest access is scoped to the event and nothing else - contributing to the party doesn't grant access to the rest of your library.

Premium and Elite - Event albums are a paid-tier feature. The mechanics of how events are allocated and metered would be formalised later (see α 0.26), but the capability lands here.

#Why this is a big deal

The hardest part of any group occasion is afterwards: everyone has a few great shots on their own phone, and they almost never end up in one place. Event albums invert that. Instead of one person begging for everyone's photos for a week, the photos collect themselves as the event happens - and the host walks away with the whole story, contributed by everyone who was there.

It also reframes what LumiFrame is. A digital frame is something in your home. An event album is something you can hand to a room full of people. That reach is why this became one of the most important features on the roadmap.

#Where it goes from here

What shipped this sprint is the foundation - the album that opens, collects, and closes. Two things were always going to follow, and both did:

Making it feel alive. An event happening right now should feel live, not like a folder slowly filling. That became the focus of α 0.24 - real-time arrival, a growing gallery, and a recap when it's over.
Removing the last install. A QR code is great, but a guest still needed the app to contribute. Taking the whole experience to the open web came in α 0.25.

Building the durable mechanism first, then the delight, then the reach - in that order - is exactly how this feature was meant to grow.

AlphaFeb 1, 2026

Several features shipped in quick succession between the media format sprint and TestFlight. They were small enough individually to not warrant a full sprint writeup, but together they represent a meaningful expansion of what LumiFrame can do.

#Cast support

Chromecast and AirPlay - You can now cast your slideshow to any Chromecast, AirPlay, or Smart TV device on your local network. A CastService handles mDNS discovery, a local media server for content delivery, and integration with the PlaybackCoordinator so cast playback stays in sync with the app's controls. Cast sessions support play, pause, next, and stop commands.

Web client casting - A browser-based cast option was also added for devices that don't support Chromecast or AirPlay natively.

#App security

Passcode lock - A 4–6 digit PIN can be set to lock the app on launch. Available on Premium and Elite tiers. A separate slideshow passcode protects frame controls from accidental changes.

Current note: The app passcode is a 4-digit PIN; the 4–6 digit range described above does not match the current implemented behavior, which auto-submits after 4 digits.

Biometric authentication - Face ID, Touch ID, and fingerprint unlock are available as alternatives to the passcode via the local_auth package. Biometric data never leaves the device - the app verifies a cryptographic result from the secure enclave, not the biometric itself.

Security notifications - An optional Cloud Function sends push notifications when security events occur (passcode changed, new device login, etc.).

#Product policy update

No ads, ever - LumiFrame does not show ads on any tier. See /pricing for the current plan structure.

AlphaJan 29, 2026

This sprint expanded the range of media LumiFrame handles well and improved how the existing pipeline deals with edge cases.

#New format support

HEIC/HEIF - The native photo format from iPhones since iOS 11. HEIC files are now fully supported for upload, display, and thumbnail generation across the entire pipeline - from the native media handler to Dropbox/OneDrive imports and event album uploads.

#Upload and ingestion improvements

Deduplication across sources - The SHA-256 hash pipeline now runs consistently across all import paths - camera roll, Dropbox, OneDrive, and event albums. Duplicates are caught before upload regardless of source.

EXIF orientation handling - Profile photo uploads now respect EXIF orientation data and auto-rotate before cropping and display. This eliminates upside-down or sideways photos from older cameras when users set a profile picture.

#What didn't ship this sprint

Server-side video transcoding (ProRes → H.264, for example) and RAW camera file support were explored and scoped, but both require infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. They remain on the roadmap but weren't worth pretending were done.

AlphaJan 15, 2026

This alpha continued internal experiments for helping people revisit shared-album activity. Those experiments were not part of the public release, so the original feature preview has been removed until the work is ready to launch.

AlphaJan 1, 2026

Happy New Year. 2026 started by tackling one of the most natural next features: getting photos off of cloud storage services and onto frames without any manual work.

#Dropbox integration (Elite tier)

OAuth connection - Connect your Dropbox account from LumiFrame settings. A secure OAuth 2.0 PKCE flow stores only a refresh token - no password, no full access to your Dropbox.

Folder selection - Choose one or more Dropbox folders to sync. LumiFrame monitors them for new photos and videos and imports them to linked albums.

Import history - A log in settings shows every file imported, when it arrived, and from which folder. Any item can be removed from LumiFrame without affecting the original file in Dropbox.

Conflict handling - Files already in LumiFrame (matched by SHA-256 hash) are skipped silently rather than creating duplicates.

#OneDrive integration (Elite tier)

OneDrive was built alongside Dropbox using the same cloud-source architecture. Microsoft OAuth 2.0 PKCE flow, folder browsing, and the same import/dedup pipeline. Both services share the same CloudSourceService abstraction, which made adding the second provider significantly faster than the first.

#Google Photos (in progress)

Google Photos integration is also underway, using the Google Photos Library API. The implementation exists but requires navigating a more restrictive API review process before it can ship to users.

AlphaDec 18, 2025

The holidays felt like the right moment to step back from features and make everything more beautiful. This sprint was a full UI pass - new design language, new onboarding, and the kind of polish that makes an app feel considered.

#Design language: Glassmorphism

LumiFrame adopted a glassmorphism visual language: frosted glass panels, translucent layers, soft violet gradients, and generous blur effects. The result is a UI that feels premium without being heavy. Every screen now has visual depth.

Key tokens formalised this sprint:

Blur radius: 12–24px for panels, 40px for modal overlays
Primary accent: #7C3AED violet with a soft glow
Glass surface: white/8–12% opacity over a dark base layer
Radius: 20–28px for cards, 16px for buttons

#Onboarding redesign

The original onboarding was functional but forgettable. The new flow:

Welcome screen - Full-bleed ambient video showing LumiFrame in a real home
What is LumiFrame? - Three illustrated feature cards, swipeable
Account creation - Streamlined to three fields, social login first
First frame setup - Guided setup with a spotlight tutorial walking through the four-phase flow (frame → album → activity → slideshow)
First album - Prompt to add photos immediately; the first win comes fast

#Animation system

A formalised animation library was built: LumiEntranceAnimation, LumiVisibility, LumiPressable, LumiPulse. Consistent easing and duration tokens replace scattered custom animations across the codebase. The app now feels unified in motion.

Happy holidays. Back in the new year with more to show.

AlphaDec 4, 2025

α 0.14 - Premium Tiers and Access Control

LumiFrame needs to sustain itself long-term. This sprint introduced subscription tiers that gate advanced features while keeping the core experience genuinely useful for free.

Current note: pricing, limits, and packaging have evolved since this alpha entry. See /pricing for the live plan structure and current product policy.

#The tier structure

Free

2 devices
1 GB cloud storage
No ads

Premium - $5.99/month or $29.99/year

10 devices
15 GB cloud storage
No ads
Clock mode
Passcode security

Elite - $9.99/month or $79.99/year

25 devices
50 GB cloud storage
No ads
Cloud source imports (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos)
Event albums
Extended batch operations

#What shipped under the hood

AccessTierService - A single service in the app that gates every premium feature. No feature checks are scattered across the codebase; they all route through AccessTierPolicy. Changing a tier rule is a one-line change.

Firestore-based subscription management - Subscription state lives in the user's Firestore document and is managed through Cloud Functions that handle tier assignment, expiry, and lifecycle events. In-app purchases are processed through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Paywall UI - A contextual paywall appears when a free-tier action hits a premium boundary. It's informative rather than aggressive - explaining what gets unlocked without blocking the rest of the app.

Server-side enforcement - Firestore rules and Cloud Functions enforce tier limits independently of the client. Storage quotas can't be bypassed from the client side.

Pricing will be finalised closer to launch.

AlphaNov 20, 2025

This alpha focused on internal prototypes for helping people revisit recent shared-album activity. Those experiments were not part of the public release, so the original feature preview has been removed until the work is ready to launch.

AlphaNov 6, 2025

After five months of feature sprints, a full two weeks were dedicated to doing nothing but making LumiFrame faster and more reliable. The output was significant.

#Performance improvements

Cold start time reduced by 38% - Profiling the startup path identified three blocking operations that could be deferred. The app now reaches a usable state in under 1.8 seconds on a mid-tier Android device.

Memory footprint at steady state - Long-running frame sessions were showing memory growth over 48+ hours. The media cache eviction strategy was rewritten using an LRU policy with explicit size limits. A 72-hour soak test now shows a flat memory graph.

Firestore read cost audit - Every Firestore read the app performs was audited, and 14 redundant reads that were firing on every navigation event were eliminated. An in-memory cache layer now serves repeated lookups of stable data.

Image render pipeline - Thumbnails were being decoded on the main thread in some grid layouts. All decode operations were moved to a background isolate. Grid scrolling is now consistently 60fps on all test devices.

#Stability fixes

Fixed a race condition in the upload queue that could cause a photo to be uploaded twice
Fixed frame status listener not resuming after app moves to background and returns
Fixed crash when opening an album that was deleted by another user while you were viewing it
Fixed notification delivery failing silently when FCM token refresh coincided with a cold start
23 additional minor fixes surfaced from extended dogfooding

#Lessons from this sprint

Every product benefits from a dedicated stability sprint before expanding scope. These fixes would have been much harder to isolate later. Take the time.

AlphaOct 23, 2025

Update (June 2026): Frame groups were retired. LumiFrame now uses a flat frame list with per-frame permissions. This post is kept for history.

If one frame is good, several should be even better. This sprint added the ability to organise frames into groups - essential for households with displays in multiple rooms.

#What shipped

Frame groups - Create named groups ("Downstairs", "Bedroom", "Office") and assign any combination of your frames to them. Groups appear alongside individual frames in the app for easy organisation.

Group album assignment - Set an album on a group and all member frames display that album's content. This is the most common multi-frame use case: your entire home showing the same shared album.

Group management - Add or remove frames from a group at any time. Drag-and-drop reordering keeps groups tidy. A frame can belong to multiple groups simultaneously.

#Implementation note

Group state is maintained in Firestore alongside individual frame documents. The grouping layer is primarily an organisational tool in the current implementation - individual frame commands (play, pause, next) are still issued per-frame. True fan-out group commands are planned for a future sprint.

AlphaOct 9, 2025

Frames aren't always actively displaying photos. This sprint made the idle state worth looking at.

#What shipped

Clock mode - When you pause the slideshow or want a cleaner display, the frame switches to a full-screen clock. It's a minimal digital clock - light type on an OLED-black background - designed to look good in any room without drawing too much attention. Clock mode is available on Premium and Elite tiers.

Current note: Clock mode is now available on all tiers including Free. The Premium/Elite restriction described above applied at the time of this sprint but was later lifted. See /pricing for the live plan structure.

Display brightness control - A manual brightness/dim slider per frame, adjustable from the app without touching the frame. This lets you dial down the display for nighttime or dim rooms so the screen isn't a distraction.

#What this means for daily use

A digital frame that goes dark or shows a jarring screensaver at night is a frame that gets unplugged. Having a useful, calm idle state dramatically increases the hours-per-day a frame is genuinely pleasant to have in the room.

Clock mode is intentionally simple in this sprint. More display modes and scheduling capabilities are on the roadmap.

AlphaSep 25, 2025

LumiFrame is fundamentally a social product - shared memories between people who know each other. This sprint invested in the social infrastructure that makes that meaningful.

#What shipped

Profile photo upload - Upload a profile photo directly from your camera roll. The image is processed through the same R2 thumbnail pipeline used for album media: multiple sizes generated, the smallest used in contributor lists and notifications, the largest shown on your profile.

@username handles - Every user has a unique, lowercase handle. Handles are 3–30 characters, alphanumeric with underscores only, and reserved against a list of protected names. Once claimed, handles are permanent.

Album-based connections - The social model in LumiFrame is built around shared albums, not follows or friend requests. You connect with someone by inviting them to one of your albums (or accepting an invitation to theirs). Once you share an album, that person becomes a connection - visible in your profile and available for future invitations without needing to re-enter their details.

Invite by username - When inviting someone to a shared album, you can enter their @username directly. The system resolves the username to a user account, and they see who you are before accepting. This makes invitations more trustworthy than anonymous links alone.

#What this enables

The social layer isn't a vanity feature. It supports activity, reactions, comments, and future shared-memory experiences between connected people.

AlphaSep 11, 2025

Media needs to be everywhere - on the phone, cached on the frame, and backed up safely in the cloud. This sprint the sync layer was rebuilt from scratch with a proper architecture instead of the rough prototype from 0.4.

#What shipped

Two-way sync engine - Changes made on any device propagate to all others within seconds. The frame doesn't poll; it listens to Firestore for change events and fetches only the delta.

Offline queue - Photos added while offline are queued locally and uploaded automatically when connectivity restores. The queue is persistent across app restarts, supports adaptive concurrency, battery-aware throttling, and handles partial uploads gracefully with retry logic and cancel tokens.

Storage quotas - Each account tier has a storage ceiling enforced server-side via Cloud Functions. The app shows a live storage usage indicator in settings and warns as you approach capacity. Uploads are gated at the limit.

Media deduplication - A SHA-256 hash is computed client-side before upload. If the exact same file already exists in the library, the upload is skipped silently. This prevents duplicate storage without the complexity of near-match detection.

Thumbnail generation pipeline - Cloud Functions listen for new media uploads and generate multiple sizes for different use cases: small thumbnails for grids and notifications, medium for frame-quality display, alongside the original.

AlphaAug 28, 2025

LumiFrame now tells you when things happen. Push notifications seem straightforward until you think about all the ways they can go wrong - stale tokens, duplicate sends, notification fatigue. This sprint focused on getting them right rather than just getting them shipped.

#What shipped

New photo notifications - When a contributor adds a photo to a shared album, all other members receive a quiet notification: "Jamie added 3 photos to Summer Trip."

Frame status alerts - If a frame you own goes offline for more than 5 minutes, you get a notification. When it comes back online, another one. Both are off by default; opt in from frame settings.

Batch notification throttling - For people in active shared albums, individual upload notifications can get noisy. The system batches rapid uploads (within a short window) into a single grouped notification instead of firing per-upload.

FCM token lifecycle - Tokens are registered on login, refreshed when they expire, and cleaned up on sign-out. Multiple devices per account are supported - each gets targeted notifications individually.

#What didn't ship

Marketing/promotional notifications were deliberately skipped for now. The notification channel should earn trust by delivering consistently useful in-product notifications first. People who never find notifications annoying are people who stick around.

AlphaAug 14, 2025

LumiFrame is meant to be shared. This sprint introduced the collaboration model that makes it possible for a everyone to contribute to a frame - with clear boundaries around what each person can do.

#What shipped

Contributor roles - Three levels: Viewer (can see the album), Contributor (can add and remove their own photos), Admin (full album management including inviting others and changing settings).

Invite by link - Generate a shareable invite link for any album. Recipient taps the link, creates or signs in to their account, and they're in at the role you specified. Links expire after 7 days.

Pending invite management - Album admins can see pending invites, cancel them, and resend them. Invitees see their pending and accepted invitations in one place.

Contributor photo attribution - Every photo in a shared album shows who added it. Names and avatars appear in the media detail view.

Remove contributors - Admins can remove a contributor. Their previously uploaded photos optionally stay (owner decides).

#On the data model

Contributor state is stored in users/{owner_uid}/albums/{albumId}/contributors/{contributorUid}. This keeps album ownership clear - the album lives under the owner, not in a neutral shared space - while still letting contributors query their own memberships. It's unconventional but it scales.

AlphaJul 31, 2025

Photos are on the frame. Now they needed to look great in motion. This sprint was all about the playback experience - the thing people will stare at every single day.

#What shipped

Custom slideshow engine - VideoPlayerManager and PlaybackCoordinator were written from scratch rather than relying on an off-the-shelf slideshow library. This gives full control over prefetching, memory management, and transition timing.

Transitions - Multiple transition styles implemented: fade (crossfade between slides), elastic (scale-and-bounce entrance), dissolve (native video layer dissolve), swipe (film-strip slide in four directions), crumble, and flash. Transitions are configurable per album.

Playback settings - Display interval (configurable per album), shuffle mode, loop, and fit/fill behaviour for different aspect ratios.

Tap to pause / swipe to advance - Gesture controls on the frame display itself for moments when you want to linger on a photo or skip ahead.

Preloading - The next items in the queue are pre-decoded in memory so transitions are instantaneous. This was the single biggest perceived-quality improvement of the sprint.

#Why build a custom engine

Third-party slideshow packages either couldn't handle mixed photo/video sequences reliably, or they introduced memory leaks at longer runtime. For a frame that runs for hours at a time, memory stability isn't optional. The engine was tested across extended continuous runs before it was called done.

AlphaJul 17, 2025

You can now add photos and videos to LumiFrame. This sprint was the most feature-dense one so far and required deep coordination between the Firestore data model, Cloudflare R2 storage, and the app UI.

#What shipped

Albums - Stored in users/{uid}/albums. Each album has a title, cover photo, visibility setting, and metadata. Albums can be assigned to one or more frames.

Photo and video upload - Media flows from your camera roll through a signed upload URL to Cloudflare R2. Thumbnail generation happens server-side via a Cloud Function triggered on upload. The app stores a reference in users/{uid}/media linking the R2 key to the album.

Media grid - A responsive grid in the app showing your photos and videos per album, with lazy loading and smooth scroll performance.

Assign album to frame - Tap a frame, pick an album. The frame starts pulling and displaying that album's media within seconds.

#Storage architecture

The storage approach settled on a tiered model:

Thumbnails (256–512px) served from media.lumiframeapp.com CDN - fast, cached, cheap
Full resolution served via time-limited signed URLs for privacy
Frame-quality renditions generated at upload and cached for frame delivery

Getting this pipeline right early means no media migration will be needed later. It already feels solid.

AlphaJul 3, 2025

LumiFrame is finally living up to its name. This sprint built the core of the product: turning any device into a connected display.

#What shipped

Device-to-frame conversion - Any device running LumiFrame can be converted into a frame. Log in on a spare phone or tablet, open the "Create Frame" dialog, give it a name, and the device registers itself as a managed frame on your account. No QR codes, no network configuration - just sign in and convert.

Frame registration in Firestore - Each registered frame gets a document at users/{uid}/remote_frames/{frameId} containing its name, status, last-seen timestamp, and assigned album. A deterministic short ID is generated via ShortIdService for human-readable identification. The phone updates this document; the frame listens for changes and reacts immediately.

Frame health monitoring - A UnifiedHeartbeatService reports each frame's online status, battery level, playback state, and connectivity on a regular interval (default: every 2 minutes). The app surfaces a badge when a frame goes offline so you always know what's happening.

Rename and delete frames - Basic management from the app: rename a frame to something meaningful ("Living Room", "Kitchen"), or remove it from your account entirely.

#Lessons from this sprint

The hardest part was ensuring the frame's Firestore listener recovers gracefully after a network dropout. A reconnect strategy with exponential backoff was added - something that becomes increasingly important as more real-time features get layered on.

Next up: the media side. Albums, uploads, and getting photos onto the frame.

AlphaJun 19, 2025

You can now create an account in LumiFrame. That sounds modest, but the auth system built this sprint is the backbone everything else will sit on.

#What shipped

Sign-up flow - Three-step onboarding: email + password, then display name and @username claim, then you're in. Usernames are globally unique, enforced both client-side and in a Firestore usernames registry to prevent races.

Google Sign-In - OAuth with Google works end-to-end, including the edge case where a Google-authenticated user and an email user could theoretically collide on the same address. Handled safely.

Firestore user document - Every user gets a users/{uid} document that stores displayName, username, email, tier, photoUrl, and timestamps. This doc is the source of truth across every platform that will ever know about this user.

Security rules - Firestore rules written from the start, not bolted on later. Users can only read and write their own documents. Username registry is append-only from clients.

#Under the hood

A deliberate choice was made to require email verification before most write actions are permitted. OAuth providers (Google, Apple) are auto-verified. Password users must confirm their email. This small friction point eliminates a large class of abuse.

Next sprint: frame connection - the core product feature that makes all of this worth building.

AlphaJun 5, 2025

Today the first real line of LumiFrame code was committed. After a month of planning, the architecture felt solid enough to start building.

Flutter was the choice for the mobile client - one codebase for iOS and Android, with the performance profile needed for smooth media playback. Firebase was the obvious backend pick: Firestore for real-time data, Firebase Auth for identity, and Cloud Functions for server-side logic that the phone should never touch directly.

#What landed in 0.1

Flutter project initialised with a clean folder structure (controllers/, services/, screens/, models/)
Firebase project created: lumiframe-1
Firebase Auth wired up with email/password sign-in
Basic navigation shell with placeholder screens
CI pipeline configured for automated builds on every push
Cloudflare R2 bucket provisioned for media storage

It doesn't do much yet. But the foundation is right, and in early-stage development, that matters more than features.

The next sprint is authentication - user accounts, usernames, and the profile document that will follow a user across every device and platform they ever use.

OriginMay 1, 2025

Every product starts with a frustration. Digital photo frames haven't meaningfully changed in decades. They still require SD cards, USB cables, or clunky cloud portals built for a different era. Meanwhile, the photos worth cherishing live on phones - close, personal, and utterly disconnected from the screens around the house.

LumiFrame started as a note in a notes app. What if your photo frame just knew what to show? What if it was as easy to update as sending a text?

#The vision

From the start, three non-negotiable principles:

Phone-first control. Everything - every setting, every album, every frame - managed from the phone without touching the frame itself.
Designed for people. Not just for the person who set it up. Anyone in the household should be able to contribute memories with no friction.
Beautiful by default. The display should look like it belongs in the room, not like a screensaver from 2009.

May was spent researching the landscape, studying how people share photos today, and sketching what LumiFrame could become. Development was set to begin in June.

This page will document every step of that journey.

What's New

Follow the build

What's New

v1.14 - Reflections Opens

#Every week, a book

#A shelf that keeps them

#People, only with your yes

#For every plan

#Lit glass

#Smaller things

v1.13 - Room for Older iPads

#iPadOS 15.5 and later

#A day from another year

#Home says it plainly

#Steadier underneath

v1.12 - One Light

#One glass, lit from above

#Photos that travel

#A new icon

#Smaller things

v1.11 - Only What You Choose

#Your phone's own picker, nothing more

#Whole albums, still one tap

#Since 1.10

v1.10 - Open It in a Browser

#Your browser is now an upload button

#The web app got quicker on its feet

#Loading looks like what is coming

#Steadier where it counts

v1.9 - While the Party Is Still Happening

#New photos join the show

#The ending is yours to set

#Smoother everywhere else

v1.8 - Every Device You Own

#Sign in anywhere

#Your frames have something to show

#Notifications that leave you alone

#Quicker, and steadier

v1.7 - Photos That Are Already There

#Your library stops reloading itself

#Nothing blinks anymore

#Lighter on a slow connection

Somewhere to Check When Something Is Wrong

#What it covers

Getting Started, Without Reading a Manual

#Seven emails, seven days

#Somewhere to ask

v1.6 - Something True to Say

#Home that knows whose memories these are

#Sign-in that actually lands

#Frames that tell you when they are away

#Keys that actually get returned

#Steadier underneath

v1.6 - Where It Happened

#Your photos keep their place and their date

#Hosting an event, with the room in hand

#Steadier underneath

v1.6 - Yours, and Only Yours

v1.5 - Passing the Album Along

#Hand the album to someone else

#Guided tours that don't get stuck

#Steadier scrolling and syncing

v1.5 - Sparkle, Atmosphere, and Reassurance

#See your uploads land

#Your themes just learned to breathe

#Clearer, more honest moments

v1.5 - A More Beautiful Way to Remember

#A more cohesive LumiFrame

#Easier to move through

#Polished in every detail

v1.3 - A Calmer Home for Your Memories

#A home that feels more like yours

#More confidence in your account

#Smoother everyday moments

v1.2 - A More Reliable Way to Keep Memories Moving

#Smoother uploads

#Better memories, wherever you are

#Albums that keep up

#Spotlight tutorials, fixed

LumiFrame Launches on Google Play