Make a Slideshow With Rasberry Pi

I explain how to make a simple photo slideshow using an old Raspberry PI 3B+.

By: Andrew M McCall
Published: January 4, 2026
Updated: January 4, 2026

Right to the point instructions

What You Need

An old Raspberry PI - I used a 3B+
A spare sd card to install OS on
A spare thumb drive with photos
Raspberry Pi Imager
An old TV - I have an old roku tv
A few minutes of time.

How to create a simple slideshow using FEH on the Raspberry PI 3B+

Format your SD Card using your preferred method
Download Raspberry PI Imager
Install whatever OS you want to work with. I just used the stock Raspberry PI OS
Boot into your PI.
Open up Terminal sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y; sudo apt install feh
sudo fdisk -l to find your drive it will usually be something like /dev/sda1 for the the partition
sudo blkid or sudo blkid /dev/sda1 -s UUID -o value. Note: You could use PARTUUID if you wanted.
sudo vim /etc/fstab
add to end of fstab like UUID={uuid} /media/picture ext4 defaults 0 2 save and exit.
sudo mount -a to remount
create a bash script in say /home/pi/scripts/slideshow.sh
create script

#!/usr/bin/env bash
PICTURE_DIR="/media/pictures"
exec feh -F --hide-pointer -z -R 20 "$PICTURE_DIR"

What this does:

executes feh in the PHOTO DIR
hides the pointer
displays in full screen mode
display photos recursively if photos are sub directories
randomizes

save the script and make sure to make it executable chmod +x /home/pi/scripts/slideshow.sh
Add this desktop entry to /home/pi/.config/autostart/slideshow.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/home/pi/scripts/slideshow.sh
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Photo Slideshow
Comment=Start photo slideshow at boot

Since the script is in the autostart folder, it should start up without issue.

Reutilizing an old Raspberry Pi 3B+

I had one sitting around. They are still completely capable server only machines, but I haven’t had much of a use case for this one particular unit. Over the holiday, I found a thumb drive with our wedding photos on it. Because I had some extra time, I decided to dig outthis raspberry pi and an old 720p Roku tv and see what I could come up with.

Initially, I was going to create a simple web app using something like Hugo or Eleventy. That would be overkill. Then I got an idea to just use FEH, a command line application that displays photos.

I won’t re-hash the script here. I will explain my process. Writing the bash script was the easiest part. FEH is well documented using man feh. The major challenge to the project was getting it started. My first attempt was writing a systemd service. This went in /etc/systemd/system/slideshow.service. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get this to work. I tried setting DISPLAY=:0 but to no avail, I could not get it to start.

I think it would have worked if I moved my systemd service to the user space instead of the system space, but while I was researching, I realized that you can put desktop entries into ~/.config/autostart folder and pi will handle starting it for you. I created the following desktop entry:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/home/pi/scripts/slideshow.sh
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Photo Slideshow
Comment=Start photo slideshow at boot

When I rebooted, my slideshow started playing without issue and it has now been running for over 3 days.

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