Digital picture frames can easily revive old memories, phone photos

Q: Are there any digital picture frames that work with Google Photos?

A: When the concept of the digital picture frame first surfaced in the 90’s, the hype around how it was going to transform our homes was pretty over the top.

All your artwork and pictures would become huge picture frames that hung on your walls and would allow you to change the décor in your home with the flip of a switch.

While everything that was predicted in the past is possible today, it’s not practical or even something most consumers really want or can financially justify.

The Basic Concept

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of a picture frame that can display thousands of images that rotate automatically, especially since we all have enormous photo libraries thanks to the awesome camera in our smartphones.

If you’re like most people, the vast majority of your images are buried somewhere in a computer or in a cloud storage service and haven’t been seen since the day they were taken.

The digital picture frame is one way to easily dig into your old photos to display all those hidden memories.

Image Display Options

In the beginning, most frames required you to either connect them to your computer via a cable or load the desired images onto a memory card that was inserted into the frame.

Today, most advanced devices are Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled and offer a variety of ways to get the images to the display.

Sending Images Directly

Many of the devices have the option to email photos to an address associated with the device, which can then automatically display the attached photo.  What’s great about this feature is that you can share the picture frame’s email address with friends and family for their photos as well.

Another common approach is to use an associated app to upload the images to the frame’s library, which can either be online or through internal storage in the frame itself.

Some frames have the ability to work with your social media accounts or online storage services.

Google Photos Integration

Since you specifically asked about a frame that works with Google Photos, my recommendation would be to look into one of the options from Nixplay for a variety of reasons.

They offer a number of frames that range from 9.7 to 15.6-inch displays, most of which use the 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio, which is more in tune with what today’s cameras produce.  Unless you plan to only display old images, I’d recommend avoiding any frame that still uses the 4:3 aspect ratio.

The Nixplay frames can be freestanding or wall-mounted, have good quality displays, have images emailed to them and also integrate with many online services such as Google Photos, Dropbox, Facebook and Instagram.

The frame can be managed and controlled via their app, and if you use Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, you can use your voice to control them as well.

All of the digital frames require them to be plugged into an electrical outlet, so keep that in mind as you choose a location to set them up.