I've been wanting to purchase an electronic picture frame for a while now. I've been putting it off since most of the screens are 600x800 pixels, even at 10".

Around February, work got the Kodak Pulse. A digital picture frame with built-in WiFi and it's own e-mail. It can connect to Facebook and display albums you specify. I didn't think about it much at first but over the last week or so I've thought about buying one.

Now, I'm entirely in the wrong community to be asking but has anyone here actually hacked a digital picture frame? I haven't started Googling as I'm simply entertaining the idea. I plan to put Linux on the frame and direct a photo viewing app to my external IP. The router will forward the port to a computer and an application that I have yet to find, will direct the incoming connection to a folder.

I suppose more importantly, does this sound entirely possible?

Highly dependent on what sort of hardware is in it, but I think it would be unlikely that you could even run Linux on the thing (without making your own patchset for the machine).
A little googling didn't show any evidence that might hint that the thing is already running Linux, which would be the best-case scenario. In any other case, you have to depend on it being similar enough to an already-supported machine+architecture to work, then on being able to talk to the display and network hardware.
[Referring to some information included in the link below, it seems to run some sort of RTOS]

Easy-mode, which requires only a bit of web programming: do some network (DNS mostly) trickery to redirect the Kodak sites it expects to a web server you control.

To answer the other query, I have indeed previously evaluated the prospects of doing nasty hax to a particular digital picture frame, but it was infeasible. That's a situation peculiarly suited to the device I was looking at though, since it was basically a no-name Chinese device. Indeed, the primary IC in it was a device that had no public documentation whatsoever- one commenter noted that it seemed to look like a MPEG-4 decoder chip from "deepest darkest China," the sort of thing you couldn't get the manuals for without finding the factory that produced whatever device contains the chip.

Hm. I'd almost be better off looking for an open-source digital frame or something with a bit more control, then.

I'll look into the "Easy-mode" as that sounds plausible from your post.

Thanks for the feedback Tari, much appreciated!

I had been wondering about this myself for a while, particulary if I could output the display of a TI-83+ series calculator to the much larger picture frame display...

I'd say you're asking in exactly the right community, personally. To provide the counterpoint to Tari, there have been some successful direct hacks of digital picture frames, such as this very EE-intensive instance, and a remote-generated image solution similar to what Tari was describing. I've also seen some digital picture frames hacked with Linux before.

Hm. I'll check those out. I'd be willing to ditch the Pulse I suppose. I only choose it because it had WiFi, so I wouldn't have to store any pictures on it.