Picture-perfect digital frames  

Q: My parents love their new digital photo frame. Can you give an overview of the best ways to handle photos for these frames?  

A: Digital photo frames are incredibly popular—and for good reason. They can help you liberate (and appreciate) your photos, compared to storing (and ignoring) them on your computer’s hard drive. Plus, unlike a regular photo frame, these new digital frames can cycle through your memories as often as you like, and many can also display video clips and play music, too.

            There are basically three ways to get the photos into the frame: inserting the memory card from the camera; connecting the frame to the PC via a USB cord and then dragging and dropping photos over to the frame’s built-in memory (check your frame’s user manual to see if this is an option); or, with higher-end models, by wirelessly accessing photos stored on a computer (Wi-Fi network required).

            A common problem with inserting the memory card, however, is that the photos from today’s high-megapixel cameras can be quite large. Therefore, the photos could be slow to load, not to mention you can’t use the card in your camera if it’s left in the frame. And if you copy all of the photos from your card over to the frame’s built-in memory, you might run out of room quickly as these files can be quite large.

            While it involves a couple of extra steps, a solution to all of these issues is to first copy all of the photos from your camera’s card over to your PC. Now you can do some basic editing, such as removing red-eye, cropping or resizing the photos down to a more manageable size. A program such as Paint, for example, which is included with Microsoft Windows, can be used to resize photos from, say, 3 megabytes to just 200 kilobytes, without losing much quality when viewed on a digital frame.

            Alternatively, you can use Windows Photo Gallery, which is built into Microsoft Windows (once inside this program, select a photo and click “E-mail” at the top to select a resize option).

            A rule of thumb is to save this resized photo on your PC as a separate file (don’t overwrite the original photo) as you’ll likely want the higher-resolution version to print from.

            Once you’re done, copy these photos over to your digital frame’s built-in memory and you’ll be able to fit many more, they’ll load faster and your memory card can be inserted back into your camera.