Guides · October 27, 2026
How to organize family videos from your phone to watch on the TV with grandparents
Videos of the kids growing up, holiday trips, birthdays: after a few years your phones hold hundreds or thousands. Everyone scrolls their own phone and nobody looks back; and when you want to show the grandparents, the phone screen is too small and they don't swipe.
Tidy them up and put them on the TV, and you have a family cinema everyone watches together. Here's a simple way to do it.
1. Gather the videos in one place
Copy videos from phone galleries, messaging apps and other family members' phones to a computer or external drive. In messaging apps, open the video and download the original before saving, otherwise the quality is poor. Don't delete anything yet; gather first, pick later.
2. Make folders by event, not by date
For grandparents, "2023-02-05" is much harder to find than "Christmas at Grandma's". Try something like:
- Baby growing up (with a subfolder per year)
- Holiday at the grandparents'
- Birthday parties
- Trips: beach holiday, flying kites in the park…
Inside each folder, put 01, 02, 03 in front of the file names in time order, and they'll play one after another in the right order.
3. Pick a photo as the cover
Put one photo in each folder and name it cover.jpg or poster.jpg as the cover for that group. A screen of photos is far easier than a list of file names; grandparents know at a glance which event it is.
4. Connect the PC to the TV
Connect the computer to the TV with an HDMI cable, switch the TV to that HDMI input, and press Win + P on the PC to choose Duplicate or Second screen only. Keep the videos on the PC's own drive for smoother playback. More detail: turn an old PC into a TV media player.
5. Let grandparents and kids pick for themselves
The last step is choosing and playing. Point KiddoRemote at your organized folders and a wall of covers (the photos above) appears on the tablet or phone. Tap a group and it plays full screen on the TV; one clip leads into the next, and next time it remembers where you stopped. Grandparents don't have to learn the computer, and kids can tap to watch themselves as babies.
A few tips
- Vertical videos have black bars on the sides on a TV. That's normal.
- Keep groups short: delete duplicates and blurry clips while sorting, and keep each group to 10–20 minutes so nobody gets tired.
- Back up: keep a copy of the originals on another drive or in cloud storage. Lost family videos can't be replaced.