20 years ago I bought a digital picture frame for my mom. In those 20 years the whole family has been sending her pictures. It’s incredibly fun to sit in her living room and see the pictures come by as there are so many events over so many years. I decided it would be fun for my family too. So I bought one for our own home. The frame worked well, however, it required an app to upload pictures and of course the app had better features with a subscription. I was using it, the kids loved it. My wife however is someone who hates having to set up accounts and download different apps for everything. So ultimately, I was only capturing half of our memories. Only the pictures I took ended up on the frame.
I didn’t want to change her personality. Honestly, I too get tired of all the alls and accounds. So how could I make this easier, more seamless? Like how you can just send people photos through iMessage? Turns out iMessage is very proprietary and hard to set up. However, Signal was already on her phone. So I used Claude Code to set up a Signal message relay and add a script to send any incoming pictures from only allowed Signal user UUID’s straight to the Picture Frame folder which is shown on the Picture Frame. Now, she can just open Photos on her iphone, select the images she wants to share and hit the Signal assistant and it lands in our Immich library where the photo frame displays it. Done.
Then I read about OpenClaw. Which was interesting, but also sounded pretty dangerous and kinda hyped. But I wondered what usable features we could grab from OpenClaw and implement into the Signal relay.
After some tinkering, the same Signal interface now talks to a local LLM running on Ollama. It checks our calendar and can add/remove stuff from it, looks up recipes in Mealie, manages the grocery list, pulls photos from our library, and controls Home Assistant. All through a normal text conversation in Signal.
Simple and private, with the option of adding Claude API to it if you want to. I chose to keep it local for now. And the best part is, my wife doesn’t need to use any of these features. She can just send pictures to it and that’s all it needs to do.
The full project is on GitHub: Jarvis