[Jeroen]

Most, if not all of us, have a huge collection of photographs on our phones. Not only do we take a lot of images ourselves, but apps such as WhatsApp have made sharing images easy and thus popular.

My wife and I are blessed with three children, who have given us three grandchildren, 4,5 years, 3 years and almost 2. We have appgroups that are shared with the other grandparents. And our kids and their respective partners are very good at always sharing images. Even at preschool, the staff takes images of all the kids and shares those with the respective parents, who share it with us.

So every day we get a number of images of our grandchildren. And we take images ourselves as well. My wife would call out every other day that she wanted a particular cute or nice image printed! So I thought I would get us a proper digital picture frame.

I had one a long time ago, when we lived in Kansas City I bought our first digital picture frame. It was not cheap and it was not that easy to use. You had to load the images on an SD card and stick the card in the frame. It had trouble reading certain picture formats and so on.

But the world of digital image frames has moved on considerably. There is a host of them out there, one to suit almost every budget. I would advise to consider the best money can buy. It's something you will be looking at every day.

My eldest son Luc had bought a digital picture frame as well, so I checked with him for what to look for. I read up on various reviews. Both in the USA as well as in Europe Aura digital picture frames came highly recommended. So I ordered one.

I was a little apprehensive about setting up this digital picture frame as it involves an App. Over the last couple of months, I have battled it out with my Sonos App. What was originally an outstanding App for the Sonos Sound system, became a total nightmare for all its worldwide users. I have spent not hours, but days getting it up again.

What makes matters worse is that these days I am not that good with computer stuff anymore. So it gets very frustrating. Because I don't know whether it is me or the App that is causing the confusion!

Luckily the Aura app worked flawlessly. I had it all up and running in a matter of minutes.

https://auraframes.com/?bopis=true

The App does several things. It allows you to pick phones from various sources and upload them to the Auro Cloud. It also controls the settings of the frame. E.g. sequence, shuttle or sequential display, remote control etc etc.



Adding photographs is easy from your phone into the Aura cloud



You can see in the App all the images you have uploaded. You can delete them, or hide them etc.



You can also email images directly to the cloud. You can give multiple persons access to your account, so they can add images themselves. Storage capacity is essentially unlimited.

We have just returned from a holiday to Barbados, the island where my wife grew up. During the last two weeks, we had our daughter Ellen with her husband Brian and our two granddaughters with them. I must have added at least a hundred images to our Aura frame of them!

I would say 85% of the images on our digital frame are of our grandchildren. But we have also added some of the images we took during our various trips on our boat Sirion. Use of the App and the cloud storage is completely free of charge. And is very secure too. Your images are not shared or sold with anybody else.

Last Christmas my eldest sister passed away. Luckily we had several images of her, including two trips on our boat we made with her. The kids also had quite several images of her, visiting them and their children (her nieces/nephews). Hilde loved little kids and all our grandchildren loved their arty aunty. Hilde would spend the whole day with them, painting, and building stuff.

So for a few weeks after she passed away, we ran a special Hilde series of images on our Aura frame, which was very nice.

Our digital image frame sits on our sideboard in our living room. So it's visible when we sit around our coffee table.



I have set up ours in such a way that it displays all the images randomly. It will also display two random portrait images together.





Landscape is just one at a time.





I just happened to choose Aura for our digital picture frame. I am sure others work equally well. Just wanted to give a flavour of how we are experiencing our digital picture frame.

I used to print my own images, but for various reasons, I had to stop doing that. I have also bought a new camera! I will put up a separate thread on that one in the next couple of days or so.

Yes, I also have quite a large stack of printed photobooks. These days very easy to put together and the quality is often reasonable to good.

The digital frame is a very welcome addition to our photography! It's nice to see these familiar images popping up, every minute a different one. It certainly provides us with even more pleasure not just looking at these images on our phones/iPads but on a nice high-quality display!

Jeroen

[Aditya]

Thread moved out from the Assembly Line. Thanks for sharing!

[Quoter]

Was in a similar search for a good digital photo frame. After all the research, settled on just converting our old TV to a digital photo frame using google chromecast. Works well especially since all of our photographs are backed up in google photos anyway.

[vellatechie]

I have a 10inch Lenovo Google Smart Display (for the living room) and a 7/8 inch Google Nest Hub (for the bedroom).

These devices have their mic off as I only use them as photo frame and they're synced with a Google Photo album.

I havent posted on my Instagram in over 6years now and I exclusively build my memories on these devices.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by vellatechie

These devices have their mic off as I only use them as photo frames and they're synced with a Google Photo album.

Thanks. I believe a lot of these digital frames can automatically sync with Google Photo. Mine can too. I don't use Google Photo though.

Jeroen

[A_Basu]

I just finished assembling a digital photo frame for my brother. It uses a RaspberryPi 3 and a 7" RPi touchscreen. It replaces the Sony digital photo frame that I had given him ~15 years ago, and was now showing its age by displaying coloured stripes on the photos.

Memories

[14000rpm]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

Aura digital picture frames came highly recommended. So I ordered one.

Thanks Jeroen. This comes in timely actually. The use case is common to everybody these days but the solution doesn't seem to very common.

I use 3 Google Nest hubs across my house that double-up as photo frames while also being music players and smart home controllers.

I've sold my soul to Google and all or photos, from my Android and my wife's iPhone, reach the same google photos account which then shows up on Google Nest Hub which runs photo slide shows.

Frankly I hadn't started looking for Digital Photo frames yet but Aura seems like what I would need for my parents though just so me and my AUS living brother can 'drop' photos on a regular basis for them to see 'as and when' they are on cloud.

I have a fear though - While Aura may not be charging for hosting, I suspect they will start charging sooner than later after they have a captive community of users.

Time will tell.

[GinsB]

I'm totally with you! Since I back up all my photos on Google Photos, I decided to get a Google Nest Hub a while back. You can select multiple albums, show recent pictures, or even create custom albums for specific people. Plus, it doubles as a clock, alarm, and so much more.

And the fact that you can listen to music and watch videos is the cherry on top! It's so nostalgic when those old photos pop up – it really makes you realize how quickly time flies