Nearly every home and workplace has framed pictures of loved ones exhibited. It is wonderful, as they serve as constant reminders of good times with family and friends. It feels like framed pictures have existed forever. In fact, the practice is new and constantly evolving.

Before the widespread use of customer cameras 100 years ago, and before the widespread use of professional cameras 200 years ago, paintings, drawings and etchings of relations were largely for aristocrats and royalty.

Color photos started being exhibited from the 1950s and’60s. From the 1980s services that published photos on big, painting-like canvases emerged. In the 1990s a little business of digital-photograph-displaying electronic frames began.

The development of ubiquitous camera phones 10 years ago and societal networks five years ago has completely transformed how we share and take our family photos. Facebook and Google+, not to mention Instagram, Flickr and hundreds of other online social photo sharing solutions give us a continuous stream of pictures, not only of family and friends but of their lunches, cocktails and pets.

Social picture sharing is a great idea. However, you know what? So is hanging pictures in your wall. Truly special and meaningful pictures ought to be lovingly framed and wrapped or propped up in your house or workplace.

The good thing is you can get it all — you will find very low-cost ways to hang brilliant, lively, high-resolution digital pictures on your wall, mantel and desk.

Looqs MeeFrame

Digital picture frames, that seem like eyeglasses for published photos but allow you display a slide show of digital pictures, have been in existence for ages. The greater ones cost between $100 and $200.

What is new in this category is the ability to download pictures from societal sites, which makes a great deal of sense — that’s where the sharing of family photos takes place.

Some of the products support downloading from Facebook. But that’s an issue. Facebook simplifies images that people upload to a lower-quality variant that occupies less space on their servers. This is true even if you upload with Facebook’s”high quality” setting.

A much better place to socially share high quality photos on the internet is Google+ or Flickr, that don’t lessen the standard of pictures uploaded. One dedicated photograph frame that supports both these networks is your MeeFrame, from Looqs. MeeFrame enables you to download pictures directly into the framework from Flickr and Picasa. (All pictures posted on the Google+ social network are also posted on the Picasa service.)

The MeeFrame provides you a high quality 8-inch framed touch screen. Along with the societal networks mentioned, it may also display pictures emailed to a dedicated email address or added to a memory card. The company also provides a cloud support for sharing photos.

The framework connects to the Web via Wi-Fi and may also play streaming Web radio, act as an alarm clock, screen the news and weather, and also do other magic tricks.

The iPad Frame

If you have the sense that the touch-screen digital image frames like the MeeFrame are barely more than iPad-like tablets with dedicated applications for displaying and downloading pictures, you’re right.

The difference is quality. The Apple iPad itself includes a higher-quality screen for showing pictures than any digital image frame — or some other tablet for that matter. The iPad is your best-quality digital picture frame you can buy. But who’s going to spend hundreds of bucks to buy an iPad simply to show photos?

The answer for a lot of is: You don’t have to spend a dime. The iPad was released almost 3 years ago. That means many of us own or will soon own our second iPad. Why not place the first one to function as a digital photo frame?

Even if you don’t have an old iPad, you may easily use your present one to show pictures when you’re not using it. A cool product known as the iPad Frame looks like a high quality wooden picture frame. However, the frame part ends, helping you to slip the iPad into it. Additionally, it is a dock that plugs into a nearby socket, therefore while the iPad is at the framework, it is plugged in and motivated for constant use.

It’s possible to prop up The iPad Frame on a mantel or hang it on a wall, and you’ll have digital photos of the maximum caliber at no cost beyond the cost of the framework and what you have already spent on the iPad. Then you are able to select from among hundreds of apps in the iTunes App Store for displaying and downloading photos from your treasured social websites, or just use the Slideshow feature of this built-in Pictures app.

Appstand

While the first iPad shipped in 2010, the first iPhone hit on the market almost six years ago. Millions of people are in their second, third or (like in my situation ) fourth iPhone.

Just as The iPad Frame frames your iPad, the Appstand frames your iPhone. It costs about $25 and transforms your old, failed iPhone (or your existing one) into a high quality picture frame for your mantel or desk.

Out My Window for Google TV

Yet another choice for displaying family photos is easy to forget: your TV. There are several ways to display slide shows on a TV set. Game consoles like the Xbox let you do that easily; you just follow the onscreen directions. And all smart-TV solutions allow you to exhibit photos, either streaming by a nearby PC over Wi-Fi or via another method. You may also quickly connect a digital camera, notebook, tablet or phone to many modern TVs and show on the large screen what you’re already able to look at on the small one.

For more societal sharing and control, however, there’s an appealing new alternative for Google TV. Google TV is Google’s smart-TV technology, which is already built into many of the major-brand wellness TVs sold these days. If you have got it, then you are able to take advantage of Out My Window.

Out My Window is a societal photo sharing service that enables photo sharing on Apple-based mobile devices, like the iPhone and iPad and now Google TV. (Support for Android telephones and tablets is coming shortly, according to the organization.) Out My Window is a really secure and private way to share socially. It shows your pictures only to folks that are using the app and with whom you have agreed to share with.

By making use of this Google TV app, you will immediately see the new pictures uploaded by family and friends in the slide show on your TV. And you’ll be able to load your own pictures to it, also.

Digital pictures look better and last longer than published photos. They’re brightly lit, and also a single framework may show you not only one but hundreds of pictures in rotation.

Plus it does not have to be expensive.

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