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After a new round of testing, Aura Carver is our new top pick, and Aura Mason is a solid pick as well.
Best Rated Digital Photo Frame
A digital photo frame lets you easily add pictures to the frame from anywhere—including beautiful travel shots and family photos. Whether you’re giving a frame as a gift and plan to upload photos remotely, or just want a great frame for yourself, the Aura Carver is the best frame we’ve used. Its 10.1-inch display is sharp, bright, and vivid, and it was easy to set up in our tests. What’s more, it has a good-looking, horizontally oriented design and fills the frame with side-by-side portrait photos.
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The Aura Carver stands out for its stylish frame, easy setup, and minimal pillarboxing compared to other frames we tried, thanks to its side-by-side method for vertical photos. It’s simple to set up and use, and uploading photos and videos remotely is a breeze — the free Aura app works on Android and iOS phones, and you can add photos via a web uploader, too. From the app’s intuitive design to Frame’s pared-down interface, Carver isn’t just for techies.
The Aura Mason shines when displaying vertically oriented photos, and its vivid 9-inch display fits well on small tables and shelves.
The Aura Mason has long been our pick and is still a great frame that we recommend. Thanks to its 9-inch display and 4:5 aspect ratio, it’s particularly good at displaying portrait (portrait) photos, and it’s smaller than the Carver, making it easier to fit on tables and shelves. The Mason can be rotated in portrait or landscape orientation, but we found the Carver’s size better suited for landscape photos, and the Mason has more pillarboxing.
Nena Farrell has been covering technology and connected home products since 2016, originally at Sunset magazine (where she was an associate home editor) and now as an updates writer for the audio, visual and smart-home team at Wirecutter.
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Brendan Nested contributed to a previous version of this guide. He has been an avid photographer and writer covering consumer electronics and technology for over a decade. Nested has worked for The Wirecutter, Reviewed, and Wired, and has written for several other outlets.
While preparing this guide, we looked at reviews from owners and trusted outlets like Wired and PCMag. Unfortunately for the average person shopping for these devices, there are many SEO-driven clickbait blogs that offer hands-off reviews. We ignored those websites.
Digital photo frames can bring great meaning and value to many people—tech-savvy or not—and often make a great gift. There are several types of people who we think would enjoy having a digital photo frame in their home:
Before starting the 2021 update to this guide, I spent about five hours researching sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo to see what new models were available. I went through owner reviews, looked for the best sellers in the category, and tried to figure out which frames and manufacturers to take a closer look at. In 2022, I spent an additional five hours researching and reviewing the latest models available using the same methods.
Wifi Digital Photo Frame, Ips Touch Screen Smart Cloud Photo Frame With 16gb Storage, Send Photos Or Video To Frame Via App Worldwide Touch Screen, Auto Rotate Landscape Or Portrait (8 Inch) :
Previous research has indicated that wirecutter readers are interested in digital frames with a diagonal size of 8 to 11 inches. This display size makes the most sense, as it’s much larger than the average phone screen, but the frame is small enough to tuck into a corner or set on top of a bookcase. Style is subjective, but it was a factor, albeit a small one, in our decision-making process.
It is important to consider the aspect ratio of the display. For example, 16:9 frames are narrow enough to display most digital photos without pillarboxing the image (adding black bars on either side). A 4:3 ratio is the ideal ratio we look for in frames. Also, we checked the resolution of each screen: while most smartphone cameras can shoot at least 10-megapixel images, it didn’t make sense for us to try anything below a 1080p display (equivalent to 2 megapixels). There are also a number of frames with 2K or 2048p displays that we considered as well, but ultimately, we don’t think most people want that high resolution in a photo frame—or pay the price tag that comes with it. That. None of our picks are 2K screens, but if it’s something you’re interested in, we cover a few good 2K options we like among other good digital photo frames.
We considered how easy it would be for multiple people to use the frame. Being able to collaborate on adding photos is a useful feature for households with multiple people who want to share frames, or for older relatives and family members who want distant loved ones to add photos.
We checked about two dozen frames above, and then, according to the above criteria, eight new frames for fall 2021, one for summer 2022, and three frames for fall 2022: Aura Carver, Aura Carver Matte, Nixplay 10-inch Touch Screen Photo Frame – Classic Matte. We tested the Aura Mason again in 2021 and 2022 to compare with the new models.
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We put every digital picture frame through a battery of tests. I took notes on each frame’s strengths and weaknesses as I examined everything from the setup process and display quality to the design, ease of use, and the quality of its automatic brightness adjustment. I then uploaded a set of 98 photos from my iPhone library and Google Photos account into each frame. These photos include new smartphone and old digital camera photos as well as professional images from my wedding.
I placed the frames in several locations in my own home to measure clarity, brightness, and brightness in different ambient lighting. I also made sure to view each frame straight on and at more oblique angles to see if the contrast dropped or any colors shifted. This process helped me gauge the ease of installation and possible snags related to the power adapter required for each frame. After narrowing down the initial pool of contenders, I placed the top three in a family member’s house across town to test how easily I could control them remotely, recording my relatives’ experiences with the frames and comparing them to my own.
Most frames now include video capabilities, and all four frames we tested in 2022 had the ability to display videos alongside photos. I uploaded the same 10 videos, shot on various iPhones and GoPros, to testing frames for upload limits, playback capability, sound quality, and how seamless (or irritating) the overall experience was.
Photographs are in an interesting place when it comes to privacy. On the one hand, we constantly share them on social networks and with friends. On the other hand, they are very personal and many prefer to keep their personal photo collections private. As a result, we expect digital photo frames to meet a certain standard of privacy and security. To assess this, we read the publicly available security and privacy documentation for each of our picks and we send a security questionnaire to the companies that make them. Aura, the company that makes two of our picks, responded, while Aiso, the maker of our previous budget pick, did not.
Best Digital Photo Frames In 2023
Aura told us that it does not share or sell customer data for advertising purposes, and that photos are encrypted in transit and on Aura’s servers. Aura’s engineers can access your photos to troubleshoot issues only upon your request, and any photos deleted from the Aura app are permanently removed from Aura’s servers and frames. Aura uses facial recognition to feature smart suggestions that are processed locally on the customer’s device to suggest adding more photos of a particular person to a frame. (Customers can opt-out at any time.) We appreciate that Ora offers a more readable summary of its operations at the top of its privacy policy and helpful guides explaining how to manage your data and permissions.
We previously recommended Aeezo frames in this guide, but the company did not respond to our security questions in June 2022, and we had yet to hear back as of November 2022. As the company describes it, while our testing showed that all Aeezo uploads remain on the local network, the fact that Aeezo did not respond to us is a sign that it does not take security seriously. If these privacy concerns don’t bother you, we still include Aeezo frames among other good digital photo frames.
Aura Carver combines impressive hardware and simple software to create a digital photo frame that’s the easiest to set up and operate and the best value. We found the quality of its screen
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