![]() ![]() You get the new one for snappy streaming and maybe even a little casual gaming, and they get one that is still perfectly suited to display pictures all day. In fact, if you feel like upgrading your old Chromecast, reusing the old one to serve up pictures for older relatives is a perfect way to get more life out of old hardware. I can’t say the same for the digital picture frames, Wi-Fi transfer SD cards, and other photo gear I’ve bought over the years. I have Chromecasts of every generation of the product somewhere in my house and while the new ones are snappier (because of better hardware) all of them work just as well as they did the day I bought them. The Chromecast line has been around since 2013 and the original Chromecasts still work fine. In addition to subscriptions, part of the downside to using a dedicated digital picture frame company (and their service) is that you have no idea how long the company will be around and how long they will support the product. If you’re a Google product user, especially with a family, that’s a no-brainer because you can share your Google One storage with your family members. If you need more storage you can upgrade your whole Google account to Google One-the lowest paid plan in $20 a year for 100GB of storage-if you want to be the host for Grandma’s photo collection. What’s better than pictures of the grandkids? Auto-magically supplied photos of the grandkids.Īlthough Google discontinued the free-unlimited photo storage option in 2020, you still get the base 15GB of storage (which is plenty for just picture frame photos). You can also take advantage of album sharing to invite friends and family to add photos as well as live photo albums where Google Photos auto-magically curates photos for you. Sure a Google account is an “extra” service, but at this point, practically everyone has one, and signing up for one is free, painless, and useful for more than just digital picture frames.Įven better is that by simply using the free Google Photos app on your phone you can easily curate the photo albums. You just upload photos to a Google account. No extra services (which may, as we mentioned, fade away or become expensive). The primary reason I use them this way is that they’re just so simple to keep updated. I have Chromecasts on every television in my house and from the beginning, I’ve used them as digital picture frames via the Chromecast’s “Ambient Mode” which displays photos when the Chromecast is not in use. Let’s rip through our previous criticisms and highlight how the Chromecast solves those problems. More advanced ones like those from Nixplay do include Wi-Fi connectivity and even some semi-streamlined sharing services, but it’s still-quite honestly-really rudimentary and not very user-friendly. That means the burden of updating the frame is a physical task that most likely falls on the gift giver-so it’s promptly going to be forgotten about. The cheapest ones are “dumb” units that can only pull pictures off an SD card or flash drive. At the time my daughter was a teenager and the photos on the picture frame were from when she was a toddler.Īnd that’s the problem with pretty much every digital picture frame on the market. Not plugged in, not in use, and not updated for ages. When I was helping to clear out my grandmother’s estate, among many a dusty thing on some old shelves in her utility room there were not one but two digital picture frames that well-meaning grandchildren had given her. It’s a picture frame that doesn’t hold just one picture but many pictures! How could it not be great? Except there are so many shortcomings that are difficult to overlook. martellostudio/ĭigital picture frames seem like a great idea. Why Digital Picture Frames Are So Terrible Thousands upon thousands of frames just like this are gathering dust. They Integrate Seamlessly with the Google Nest Hub Why the Chromecast Is the Perfect Digital Picture Frame They Require Subscriptions or Special Accounts Why Digital Picture Frames Are So Terrible ![]()
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