The best digital photo frames to personalize your home this year
Wi-Fi-enabled devices stream your favorite photos in digital displays — including art collections ranging from classic to postmodern.
Whitson Gordon
Whitson Gordon
Nixplay’s newest release is the 10.1-inch Nixplay Smart Photo Frame Touchscreen. It works like all of Nixplay’s other digital picture frames, but instead of being controlled by a remote, you can just walk over to the frame and control everything right from the screen. With an HD screen resolution of 1280x800p, the Touchscreen model can play HD video clips as well as display photos, and friends and family can upload sentimental moments to the frame from all over the world.
In August 2020, Meural entered the smart frame market with a 15.6-inch Wi-Fi frame. The frame features a Full HD display (which means it has a display resolution of 1920x1080p), and you can either upload your own photos through your smartphone or sign up for Meural’s art membership (which costs $9 a month or $70 annually) to gain access to over 30,000 images, including NFTs, Van Gogh paintings and more.
Lenovo entered the smart art market in 2020 with a 21.5-inch frame that can be mounted on the wall or perched on an easel. It has an anti-glare display with a Full HD 1920x1080p resolution, and you easily sync it up with Google Photos to rotate through your most precious moments. Not only can you control the frame with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, but you can also flick your hand to tell the screen to move on to the next photo.
Digital photo frames can cost a pretty penny, but there are affordable options out there. This touchscreen frame from Dragon Touch retails for $130 and features 16GB of storage (meaning it can hold around 40,000 photos) and an HD resolution of 1280x800p. The frame automatically adjusts from portrait to landscape and vice versa when you flip it, and you can share photos via email and the Dragon Touch app, as well as with an SD card or USB drive.
Aura’s Mason Luxe digital photo frame, one of the brand’s newest releases, offers both photo and video display options and unlimited storage for both. The 9.7-inch frame offers 2K resolution (2048x1536) and you have the ability to adjust the speed of your photo slideshow, choose how you want your photos to be displayed and upload photos from your phone.
If you want to display larger pieces, there are standalone frames that are designed to show photos and paintings in a more wall-friendly size. They all work similarly:
Most allow access to a limited collection of art for free, as well as the ability to upload your own photos — you can also purchase a monthly membership for access to thousands more.
The Meural Canvas II takes art from classic artists like Vincent van Gogh as well as contemporary artists like Rose Corcoran and David McConochie and puts them on your wall on a gorgeous screen. Seriously, it looks amazing — between its incredibly sharp picture, superb color rendering and matte finish, it looks better than most 4K TVs. You can wave your hand in front of the frame to see more information about the current piece in a small overlay, or move to the next piece in a playlist. The Meural app lets you browse the brand’s ever-rotating library right from your phone — which ranges from classic art to Marvel Comics posters and even moving cinemagraphs. You get 100 works for free, with the ability to purchase more or subscribe to the $9 per month ($70 per year) membership for access to more than 30,000 pieces.
Canvia is a relatively new smart art frame that is similar to the Meural in its general pitch: for a few hundred bucks, you can display paintings or photos in a large, wall-mounted frame. What sets Canvia apart is its larger free tier — about 2,500 pieces versus Meural’s 100 — with another 10,000 available through its subscription, which runs $10 a month ($80 a year). It also comes with a free yearlong subscription to the premium tier, which is a nice bonus.
If a standalone digital photo frame isn’t enough, Samsung’s The Frame pulls double duty as a TV when it’s on, and art when it’s “off.” Like other smart frames, it offers a small selection of paintings for free (a few hundred, by my count), and a larger selection for a monthly subscription fee of $4.99 a month. The screen doesn’t “pop” in quite the same way as, say, the Meural, and it’s more expensive than both the Meural and Samsung’s standalone TVs. But if you like the idea of having both TV and art in one frame, it’s a great alternative. (I personally own this TV, and I love having something other than a black slab to look at on my wall when the TV is off.)
Though smart displays aren’t solely designed to display photos and videos, most of the top models are now capable of playing photo slideshows when they’re not in use. As an added bonus, since these smart assistants are made by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook, they feature seamless integration with some of the most popular photo-sharing platforms and websites.
The Amazon Echo Show 15, one of Amazon’s newest Echo offerings, has a 15.6-inch Full HD screen as well as a 5-megapixel camera to take photos and videos and video chat with friends. The smart display works with Amazon Photos and Facebook as a digital frame (and Prime members have access to unlimited photo storage). As a smart assistant, it can play music, pull up recipes and more.
If you do most of your video chatting and photo sharing on Facebook, then you might prefer the Portal, which can display photos directly from your Instagram and Facebook account on its 10-inch HD screen. When you want to video chat with family or friends, you can use your Messenger, WhatsApp or Zoom account, and you can control the smart assistant with Amazon Alexa.
The Google Nest Hub, a relatively affordable smart assistant at $100, automatically displays your favorite photos from Google Photos when it’s not in use. You can ask the built-in Google Assistant to stream your favorite TV shows, find you recipes, play music and even act as a sunrise alarm.
There are a few caveats with these devices you'll want to keep in mind. First, while they look fantastic, most of these aren’t going to trick your friends into thinking you have a painting on the wall. In a well-lit room, both the Meural and the Frame actually look quite good, enough that most people do a double-take at first glance. But you can definitely tell the difference next to a real painting, and despite the ambient light sensors, the backlit screen is a bit more obvious in the evenings (though the Meural does let you fine-tune its auto-brightness quite a bit).
There’s also the matter of power cords: all of these have to be plugged into the wall to work, and most of the promotional photos cleverly hide this fact. While most attempt to disguise their cables as much as possible — the Meural uses a white, braided cable, and Samsung’s Frame uses a thin, clear cable going to its OneConnect box — they will be visible in most wall-hung scenarios. With a bit of help from an electrician, though, you could put a recessed outlet behind a smart art frame, or find another way to hide those cables within an extremely clean look.
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