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 is free of charge for personal use. When I first wrote this it was still in beta and I was not sure the free part would last. It has since left beta, and there is now a free personal tier alongside a paid tier for organisations — so for a handful of family picture frames, it stays free.

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:

Remote shell works everywhere. Screen sharing has a condition attached.

The remote shell is the part that matters most for frame maintenance, and it works on any Raspberry Pi you can install Connect on, whether or not there is a desktop.

Screen sharing is different: it needs a Wayland session to capture. Bookworm and Trixie both give you one on the desktop images, so on a desktop Pi you are fine.

Compatibility with Raspberry Pi OS Lite — I need to correct myself here

Raspberry Pi say screen sharing is not compatible with Raspberry Pi OS Lite. I originally wrote that I had found this to be incorrect, because it worked fine for me on Lite with the pi3d one-click installation.

That was true, but not for the reason I thought. It worked because that setup starts a Wayland compositor (labwc) on top of Lite in order to show the pictures — so there was a Wayland session there for Connect to capture, even though the image was called Lite.

picframe3 does not do that. It draws straight to the display through DRM/KMS, with no desktop and no compositor anywhere in the picture — which is a large part of why it is so much lighter on the Pi. There is therefore no Wayland session on a picframe3 frame, and screen sharing cannot work on one. Remote shell works perfectly, and that is what you want Connect for anyway.

If what you actually want is to see what is on the wall, picframe3 has that covered separately: it reads back its own framebuffer, so one button in its web interface (or a curl call) gives you a screenshot of the frame itself.

Note: back on the desktop side, I encountered a bug/feature where the screen sharing stopped working when the remote monitor was turned off and on again. I posted it on the Raspberry Pi forum at the time. I have not gone back to check whether it still happens on Trixie.

Kudos to the Raspberry Pi community for their wonderful work!