How to Put Your First Images on a Signage Screen

5 min read · Sep 20, 2026

A hotel lobby with a large illuminated display screen — Photo: Unsplash

Most signage software demos skip the boring middle. They show you a beautiful screen and a price list, and leave out the ten minutes where you actually move a JPEG from your laptop to a television in a lobby. That middle is the whole job, so here it is end to end, in real time and with nothing cut out — a hotel putting two photos on the screen behind its reception desk.

Uploading images, setting per-photo timing, and publishing to a screen — start to finish

Step one: get the files in

Everything starts in the media library. Drag your files in, or browse for them — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, MP4 and WebM all land the same way. The one thing worth getting right before you upload is the shape of the artwork: a landscape screen wants 1920×1080, a portrait screen wants 1080×1920, and a file built for the wrong orientation will either letterbox or crop, neither of which looks deliberate. This is the single most common reason a first screen looks amateur, and it is fixed in the design file, not in the software.

Step two: decide how long each photo holds

A still image has no natural length, so you tell it one. Ten seconds is the default and a reasonable starting point, but the right answer depends entirely on where the screen is and how long a person stands in front of it. A lobby screen people wait at can hold twenty or thirty seconds and reward a reader. A screen beside a queue that moves wants six or eight. A screen people walk past at speed wants a short, bold slide that survives a glance — and if a photo needs more than a glance to work, the problem is the photo.

Waiting areas — lobbies, clinics, salons: 15–30s, and you can afford detail and body copy.
Moving queues — checkout, service counters: 6–10s, one message per slide.
Walk-past traffic — corridors, entrances, windows: 5–8s, logo and one line, nothing you have to stop to read.
Menu boards: long holds, or no rotation at all — a menu that changes while someone is reading it is a menu nobody orders from.

Each photo carries its own timing, so a playlist can mix a twenty-second hero image with a run of quick ones. Set it once on the file and every screen playing that photo picks it up on its next sync, without anyone touching the layout.

Step three: put it in a layout

A layout is the arrangement the screen actually renders — one full-bleed zone for a simple slideshow, or a split with your photos on the left and a clock, weather or menu app on the right. Drop the images into a zone, set the order, and pick a transition per photo if you want the change to feel softer than a cut. Fade is the safe choice; the more theatrical ones are best used sparingly, on a screen nobody has to watch all day.

≈ 2 minutesFrom an empty media library to artwork playing full-screen, in the walkthrough above — the rest of this guide is the judgement, not the clicking

Step four: publish, and watch it land

Assign the layout to a screen and publish. Every paired device is notified over a live socket rather than waiting for a polling cycle, so the change lands in seconds and you can stand in the lobby and watch it happen. If the screen is offline at that moment — power cut, broadband down, a cleaner and a plug socket — nothing is lost: it picks the change up the moment it reconnects, and keeps looping the content it already has in the meantime.

What usually goes wrong the first time

The artwork is the wrong orientation. Fix the file, not the scale mode — stretching a landscape photo onto a portrait screen is visible from across the room.
Every slide holds for ten seconds because nobody changed it. Set timings per photo; a screen with the same rhythm for every slide reads as a screensaver.
Text sized for a laptop. Read it from where your customers actually stand, not from your desk — the usual verdict is that the font needs to double.
Too many slides. Three strong images beat eleven weak ones; a loop that takes two minutes to come around is a loop nobody sees the end of.

That is the entire content workflow — upload, time, arrange, publish — and it does not get more complicated as you add screens. The same layout can drive one screen or forty, which is the point at which the ten minutes you just spent starts paying rent. If you have not paired a screen yet, the Android TV guide covers the hardware side; if you have, the rest of this is the job.