And the best digital photo frame is…

…your Smart TV. I recently bought a digital photo frame only to discover that the app (Frameo) only allows you to send 10 photos at a time. Yuck, returned it.

Then I bought a Google Nest Home Hub Max, which is a really sweet device. It has great sound including bass (which you can tweak via Settings in the Google Home app), home control on screen as well as via Google Assistant (voice), a built-in camera which can be used as a Nest security cam or for video calling with Google or Zoom, the ability to play various music services, YouTube videos or Nextflix, and even cast to a Roku or Chromecast (Android TV). But I mainly bought it as a digital photo frame. Whenever you’re not interacting with it, Max cycles through your selected Google Photos album. You can create and choose a “live album” like Friends and Family, which automatically shows new photos containing the faces you’ve selected. And the photo show goes on while playing music in the background. My wife can now finally see all the photos of our kids we’ve been taking for the last 20 years… AND turn off the lights in Google Home without having me around.

I definitely plan to keep the Max. It’s a beautiful device with a lot of useful features. But after I set it up, I realized that with respect to photos, I could have done the same thing with the Sony Android TV already in my living room, which for the last year has been displaying beautiful, curated nature photos from around the world (the default setting). I forgot that once you add the TV (or Chromecast device) to the Google Home app, you can select an album to display in “ambient mode”, including a live album. Now that I think about it, I’m just guessing that devices from Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV Stick have the same capability, which might explain why the dedicated photo frame apps are so limited in functionality. The market has moved on, and I’m just now getting the message 🙂

Advertisement