I got a Chromecast as a gift three years ago. For the first two years I used it for exactly one thing: casting Netflix from my phone. Then I stayed at a friend’s house who was doing things with his Chromecast I did not know were possible. I felt like I had been using a smartphone only for phone calls.

Cast your whole screen, not just apps

Open Chrome on your laptop, click the three dots in the top right, select “Cast,” and choose “Cast screen” from the Sources dropdown. Your entire desktop appears on the TV. This is how you show photos, presentations, or anything that does not have a built-in cast button.

One catch: screen casting is more demanding than app casting. It encodes your screen as a video stream in real time. Older laptops will struggle. If the video is choppy, reduce your display resolution before casting.

Use your TV as a photo frame

Google Home app → select your Chromecast → Personalize Ambient → Google Photos. Pick an album. Now when your TV is idle, it cycles through your photos instead of the stock landscape shots. Pick a shared album if you want family photos rotating. It makes the TV feel less like a black rectangle on the wall.

Guest mode — let friends cast without your Wi-Fi password

Guest mode uses an inaudible audio tone to pair devices. Turn it on in the Google Home app under your Chromecast’s device settings. Friends can cast without joining your network. The TV shows a four-digit PIN they enter on their phone. No password sharing, no “hey what is your Wi-Fi again.”

Turn your TV on and off with your voice

If your Chromecast is plugged into the wall for power (not the TV’s USB port), it can control the TV through HDMI-CEC. Most TVs call this something different — Anynet+ on Samsung, BRAVIA Sync on Sony, Simplink on LG. Find this setting on your TV and enable it. Now “Hey Google, turn off the TV” actually works. So does “play Stranger Things on the living room TV” without finding the remote first.

Cast local video files

VLC Media Player on desktop has a built-in renderer. Playback → Renderer → your Chromecast. Any video file VLC can play, your Chromecast can show. This is the cleanest way to watch downloaded videos on a TV without copying them to a USB stick.

On mobile, apps like LocalCast and BubbleUPnP do the same thing — browse your phone’s files, tap, it plays on the TV.

Reduce the delay when casting tabs

Casting a browser tab has about a two-second delay by default. In Chrome’s Cast menu, click the settings gear and enable “Optimize fullscreen videos.” This switches the Chromecast to a low-latency mode specifically for video content. It is not perfect for gaming — latency is still too high for that — but it makes video playback much smoother.

I use maybe half of these features regularly. But even just the photo frame and guest mode make the Chromecast feel like a different device than the Netflix-only dongle I used for two years.