If you want to manually turn the screen of your digital picture frame on or off, check the available memory on your SD card or just shut down the Raspberry Pi because you will be gone for a few weeks, doing it on your iPhone is a lot faster and more convenient than logging on to your frame.

Update, September 2026. Two things in this article have aged badly. The headline commands, sudo vcgencmd display_power 1 and 0, have been retired and no longer switch a screen on or off on current Raspberry Pi OS — see the corrected section below. And PiHelper itself has not been updated since October 2020: it is still in the App Store, still free, still at version 1.6, but it is abandonware and I can no longer recommend it to somebody starting today. On a Pi 4 or Pi 5, picframe3 has its own web interface — you open http://frame.local:9000/ on your phone and there is a screen-off button on the Now playing tab, no app to install at all. For an iPhone route with a Siri and Apple Watch button, see iOS Shortcuts.

In this article, I will introduce PiHelper, a free iOS app that lets you monitor, control and manage your Raspberry Pi and consequently your digital picture frame.

Remote Control Your Pi

PiHelper

Although the digital picture frame does not require much user interaction, there are times when you may want to adjust the time controlled on/off settings when, e.g., guests stay late.

The app for that is called PiHelper and was written by Qian Sha. You can download it from the App Store for your iPhone and iPad.

If you are a nerd, PiHelper provides a direct overview of the current activities on the Pi. You can drill down into detailed stats for CPU utilization and memory or view file directories.

For somebody who values convenience, you can use PiHelper as a simple remote command to, e.g., turn your monitor on and off.

PiHelper is very easy to set up. I will show you the commands that I have configured for my use.

Setting up PiHelper

All you need to connect to your digital picture frame is your hostname (the name that you have given your Raspberry Pi, e.g., “digitalpictureframe2018”, add “.local” to your hostname, enter Port “22”, the username and your password. A note for anybody following this today: there is no default “pi” user any more — the user name is whatever you typed into Raspberry Pi Imager when you wrote the card.

Test the connection and if it works, save it.

Tap on your instance that you have just set up.

You can add the commands in the top right corner. Click on “Edit commands” and enter the commands that you would like to add.

Turn the monitor on or off

The two most requested commands are probably turning the screen on and off. Although the on/off times are defined in the crontab if you are using a time control, you may want to override them at times.

Under “Command Name” call it “Monitor on” and enter the command that switches your screen on in the Custom Command. Then repeat with “Monitor off”.

The commands I originally gave here — sudo vcgencmd display_power 1 and sudo vcgencmd display_power 0 — no longer work. vcgencmd display_power was retired and does nothing useful on the KMS graphics stack that Raspberry Pi OS has used since Bullseye. What replaces it depends on which frame you have:

  • picframe3 (Pi 4 or Pi 5, the 2026 build) switches the panel itself, over DRM DPMS. On the frame that is curl -XPOST http://localhost:9000/api/display_on, and curl -XPOST http://localhost:9000/api/display_off for the other direction.
  • Pi3D PictureFrame on a Wayland desktop session uses wlr-randr --output HDMI-A-1 --on and --off, the same commands as in my article on turning the frame on and off at fixed times. Run wlr-randr on its own first to see what your output is actually called.

I have not re-tested PiHelper itself against either of those commands. The commands are right; the screenshots below are from 2019.

Shutdown and reboot

The command for Restart is

sudo reboot

and for Shutdown

sudo shutdown now

Health monitoring information

At the bottom of the screen, you can keep an eye on the current CPU and memory utilization, the CPU/GPU temperature, and the available disk space.

Conclusion

PiHelper offers a low-cost straightforward remote control for controlling your digital picture frame. Did I already mention that it’s free?