It seems like you had the same motivation as me, connecting with the family. For quite some time it has bugged me how bad the UX on some things are, like photo sharing or video calling. Try to explain to your grandmother how to see shared photos on an iPad, and then try to do look at the same picture while on a call. Impossible!

I voiced this to a friend and he suggested to just create a simple webpage that has a controller and viewer, nothing fancy. Tied together with Shortcuts I was hoping to make a one-click button that initiated a FaceTime call and opened the webpage in fullscreen. The latter part seems harder, due to limitations in Shortcuts, but so far I've successfully been able to have her press the Home-button and then click the bookmark for this service to open the viewer. Perhaps a Jitsi Meet integration is just what I need.

Being able to view pictures this way has been truly amazing. My dad has digitized a lot of old pictures, and it's so engaging for her to explain what farm a given picture was taking on, and who is in the picture. Things like that. She really enjoys it. I don't understand how this isn't built into FaceTime or something similar. Seems like such an obvious thing.

Shameless plug, and be warned it's quite bandwidth intense, in true disruptive start-up fashion it lacks everything, like optimization and security: https://github.com/vegardx/abuela