Why Raspberry Pi Connect is the perfect screen sharing and remote shell tool for your digital photo frame maintenance

By accident, I recently stumbled upon Raspberry Pi Connect, which is a fantastic feature that enables both screen sharing and remote shell access to a Raspberry Pi.

The best part is that it doesn’t need to be a Raspberry Pi on your local network, unlike traditional screen-sharing tools like VNC. It also replaces tools like Dataplicity.

Even better, it’s free of charge—at least for now. It’s currently in the beta phase, so I’m not sure if this will change in the future.

If you’re managing digital picture frames for your family, this tool is ideal. Not only can you work on the remote Raspberry Pi through a terminal, but you can also see, in near real-time, what is happening on the other side.

The Raspberry Pi Connect documentation is excellent and explains how to install the software, so I won’t repeat the instructions here. Instead, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Wayland Requirement

Screen sharing requires the Wayland window server, which is used with Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. So make sure the Raspberry Pi you are trying to remote control has Bookworm OS.

Compatibility with Raspberry Pi OS Lite

They also mention that screen sharing is not compatible with Raspberry Pi OS Lite, the default installation for the Pi3D PictureFrame software. However, I found this to be incorrect. It works fine with the new installation instructions using the Lite version of OS Bookworm.

Kudos to the Raspberry Pi community for their wonderful work!

Thank you for your support and motivation.