Today, plain and simple picture frames and photo albums are becoming so passe. After all, they only show one picture at a time. YAWN! Even collage photo frames, that can display many pics at at time, are so hopelessly static.
Their main advantage over traditional picture frames is that they offer a simple, convenient way of sharing your picture collections with the world anywhere, any time. You can have an automated slide show set up, or maybe you’d can play some music in the background. You can even choose small, portable digital photo frames, or a digital keychain photo frame – so that you can carry your memories with you whenever you are traveling.
Years ago it was very common to find roll upon rolls of undeveloped film tucked away in your bedroom drawers. Today it’s typical for photographers to have their snapshots stored on memory cards, CD-ROMs, or maybe their PC’s hard drive. In the best-case scenario, they are uploaded to photo albums on the web and shared with others, but most often than not, the digital photo collections are unknown, unshared and unappreciated.
The key points that may persuade users to opt for a digital picture frame rather than either a standard frame or a photo album are the facts that digital frames can store large numbers of photos and that no cost or resource is required to print physical copies of the photographs.
Digital photo frames can store thousands of photos on a variety of electronic memory devices – some frames have their own internal memory, but for those that don’t, cheap memory cards can be used as the storage medium. The photos stored in this manner can be automatically cycled through to display a slide show with preset timings between different images – or the picture on display can be set in static mode and then changed manually.
No more rooting around in the attic or searching through old shoe boxes looking for that photo you’ve just remembered about.
The fact that the images are stored electronically is also a big benefit. It means that there is no requirement to pay processing charges, or to cover the printing costs for your collection of family pictures, travel memories, child photography or other in order to either view it yourself or to display it to your family, friends and colleagues.
I think it’s unlikely that traditional photo albums and photo frames will disappear completely any time soon. People will probably still have some of their favorite pictures printed out. But, with digital photography era when people can use digital photo albums online and electronic picture frames, I can well imagine bulky photo albums being phased out relatively quickly.
Read more about Electronic Picture Frames and How to Choose a Digital Photo Frame.