Photo sharing - The Next Generation
I have been wanting to buy a digital photo frame for a while now, mostly because I never get to regularly see any of the photos I take with my digital camera as they are stored on a computer which I don't leave permanently switched on. However, the thing that keeps putting me off about them is the time consuming task of having to manually copy photos from the computer onto a chip and then keep the chip updated with new pictures as I take them; I don't seem to get much free time lately, and the last thing I want to do when I do have time is to spend it going through photos to copy onto a photo frame.
Ideally what I want is a photo frame that could connect to my online photo album and display all the contents of the album, without any intervention from me. That way, I could plug the frame in, configure it's Internet access and then just leave it to regularly update it's contents. When I first looked at the digital photo frames it seemed that what I wanted did not exist as no frames had wireless Internet connections, only USB or card readers for photo storage.
Yesterday I received an internal email mentioning a new Windows Live service called FrameIt that is currently in beta. Basically, what it does is create a single RSS feed, the feed could be a combination of several other ones, that you can then use on a digital photo frame as the frame's main contents (it also allows you to add additional content such as weather information and news headlines). Of course, it requires an Internet-capable photo frame, which means that my ideal frame now exists!
The possibilities with this service are almost endless, but the one that instantly sprang to my mind is that, if my parents also had one of these Internet-ready photo frames, I could instantly share my pictures with them via FrameIt. Any new pictures that I added to my online gallery would almost instantly be displayed right in their front room.
Go check it out here: frameit.live.com, you can sign up for the beta program in just a few clicks. I have signed up already and the service looks really good, so now all I need is to buy a photo frame. My only problem now is deciding which one to buy...