Best Photo Frame Software

Are you looking to improve your photographs but unsure which online photo editor to use? We’ve created a handy guide to help you decide which one is right for you.No matter your skill level as a photographer or how good a shot is pre-editing, there are almost always things that can be improved or retouched in some way. That’s where photo editing apps come in—quality matters, and you shouldn’t need to break the bank in order to achieve the level of polish you want for your work.When it comes to photo editing apps, is undoubtedly the paid tool of choice thanks to its unrivaled power and accessibility Your success as a photographer hinges on great quality photographs, an to showcase your work, and to shoot with—and this can add up. When all is said and done, a tight budget might make it tough to spend more on paid photo editors, especially when there are great free programs out there.Rather than focus on well-known, higher-priced editors such as or Lightroom, we’re going to point you towards the best lesser-known options for free online photo editors. With the vast array of photo editing apps available on the market, making a choice can be difficult if you don’t know the benefits and features of each app. Multi-Platform Photo EditorsWhen it comes to free photo editors, is king. Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is the closest you can get to Photoshop without paying a dime.

It comes equipped with an impressive number of professional-quality functions, a completely configurable interface, allows fine-tuning of images, and contains a fully-integrated toolset that allows the creation of professional quality original artwork., you can almost certainly do it in GIMP. If you want even more options, you can also use Photoshop plugins, which provide you with unmatched flexibility compared to any other free photo editor. GIMP is also, which means that if you have the know-how, you’ll be able to add your own filters and features should you desire.If you are experienced in image editing software you should get the hang of GIMP relatively quickly, but those not well versed in image editing software may find the interface cluttered or non-intuitive.

A fair compromise for the sheer editing power you get at no cost!Best for: Experienced users and those wanting powerful processing and art tools for a zero dollar price tag.For a free program, Photoscape is actually quite impressive—it’s fantastic for editing and managing your personal photo archive. While Photoscape is a bit lacking in the interface department (it can be somewhat confusing), it contains an image viewer, batch processing, a screen-capture tool, and a great selection of filters and effects to take your photographs to the next level.The photo editing portion of this app is where it truly shines, and even new users will be able to produce exceptional, professional-looking shots in moments.

Photoscape even has some handy little functions to make your photographs look like analog shots, a decent cut-out feature, image transformation capability; it also gives access to over 240 figures, frames and borders, and more than 1000 patterns to use in your creatives.Best for: Batch processing and experimentation. Online Photo EditorsAre you looking to apply quick changes to your photos with very few headaches? While you’re required to sign up before you can utilize Pixlr’s myriad features, the extra few minutes of setup are well worth the effort.This online photo editor is available via your browser, the iPhone and Android platforms, and provides a number of simple one-click functions and a relatively robust toolset. Perhaps the best feature of this app is just how easy it is to use: it contains tutorials to guide you through the more complicated features and can be mastered very quickly once you get the hang of things. If you are familiar with photo editing apps, then this is a fantastic choice for you.In addition to this great little program, the company also provides (a free vector graphics editor), some that you can use in your creatives, and a nice selection of should the need arise.A tiny little caveat: While this app is free to use, the best features are locked behind a paywall. You’ll need to go Pro if you intend to take advantage of the more advanced functionality.

Even so, it remains one of the most popular iPhone photo editors in the world.Best for: Beginners; quick and simple image processingFree photo editor Fotor (for Windows or web browsers) is an excellent tool with an extremely easy-to-understand UI that makes it simple to use. Considering how choppy some browser-based programs can be, Fotor’s performance is fantastic and won’t hog system resources—which can cause your computer to start chugging along like a broken locomotive and waste precious time.Fotor provides a wonderful set of Smart Filters and effects, as well as an engaging photo collage tool, and can handle RAW files without much issue.

Browse Close Search Wirecutter For: Search.Search Wirecutter For: SearchReviews for the real world. After 18 hours of research and testing, we think the 10-inch is the best digital photo frame for most people who want to display pictures uploaded wirelessly from their smartphones, hard drives, or social media and cloud storage accounts. Its superior display and simple setup lift it above the competition. And since you can send photos to the frame via Nixplay’s cloud services or email, or indirectly through a shared Dropbox folder, if you give one as a gift you can share photos with the recipient even if they happen to be halfway across the world. The high-resolution IPS display offers pleasing colors and a wide viewing angle, so your images look great from every corner of the room. The panel’s 4:3 aspect ratio means it can display your smartphone photos full screen, without black borders, and you can position it in either portrait or landscape orientation.

Step-by-step instructions on the Nixplay website make connecting the frame to your Wi-Fi network and uploading images quick and foolproof. Those images can come from your phone or computer, as well as from social media and cloud storage accounts such as Instagram or Dropbox.

A motion sensor lets you conserve energy by putting the display to sleep after you leave the room. Using a cleverly designed semirigid USB power cable that doubles as a stand, the Seed can sit in either portrait or landscape orientation at a range of angles.You can control the Seed using either the included remote or the company’s free app (iOS and Android). Its 8 GB of internal storage gives you enough room for about 25,000 smartphone images. Although it isn’t the cheapest digital picture frame, the Seed offers a combination of features, user customization, ease of operation, and picture quality that its rivals can’t match.

If you prefer loading your images via SD card or USB stick instead, Nixplay’s will save you a significant bit of cash while still providing all of the other benefits of our top pick, aside from wireless connectivity. You get the same great screen, motion sensor, and remote, along with easy setup and operation. And Nixplay helpfully includes an 8 GB USB stick to get you going. But since this model lacks a Wi-Fi connection, if you give it as a present, you’ll need to rely on the recipient to load photos onto the frame. The Advance is the highest-rated digital frame on Amazon, with a 4.5-star rating across more than 530 user reviews at the moment, and it comes in a wider range of sizes than we’ve seen from any other frame maker. I’ve covered photo gear at The Wirecutter since 2013, and I’ve worked as a professional photographer and digital-imaging consultant for 15 years.

I also ran my own digital-printmaking shop for a nearly a decade, producing exhibition-quality photographs on wide-format inkjet printers. I’m on the faculty of New York City’s International Center of Photography, and I lead photography workshops around the country.In preparing this guide we brought in eight digital photo frames for side-by-side comparisons and real-world use in my home. How we picked and tested. We brought in eight frames for several days of use in a home environment.We cut through the clutter of the 1,600 digital photo frames listed on Amazon by limiting contenders according to some key criteria. In a poll of more than 200 Wirecutter readers, two-thirds of respondents said they were interested in frames sized between 8 and 11 inches. On top of that, with even budget compact cameras delivering 20-megapixel images, using a low-resolution frame makes no sense, so we looked for screens with a resolution of at least 1024×768 pixels.

And because smartphones (and several stand-alone cameras) capture images in a 4:3 aspect ratio, we ignored frames with 16:9 displays, since they force you to crop those photos or to present them with large black borders on two sides.Using these criteria we had only 10 frames to consider, eight of which we brought in for testing. Some, such as the, were plagued by poor screen quality. Others, like the very expensive, were frustrating to use. For a closer look at what we dismissed and why, see.Onto each frame, I loaded identical sets of images shot on cameras ranging from smartphones to DSLRs. I compared image quality, functionality, and ease of use while working with the frames for several days in various rooms of my home.At the time of publishing, the price was $0.After 18 hours of research and testing to figure out which features are essential in a digital photo frame, plus hands-on time with eight contenders in a home environment, we think the is the best choice for most people. Its 10-inch display produces pleasing color and contrast in a 4:3 aspect ratio that’s perfect for smartphone photos. Setup is quick and foolproof, and built-in Wi-Fi lets you import photos from your social media, email, or cloud accounts.

And a clever cord/stand design lets you position the frame in either portrait or landscape orientation.If you give the Seed as a gift, keep in mind that it can show images sent to a special email account. If you want to send a new photo to your gift recipient, just drop it into an email, and it’ll automatically show up on their frame.Setup is quick and foolproof, and built-in Wi-Fi lets you import photos from your social media, email, or cloud accounts.We tested the 10-inch version of the Seed (7- and 8-inch models are also available) and found that its produced pleasingly accurate results along with a wide viewing angle, ensuring that images looked great from every corner of the room. The screen’s 4:3 aspect ratio is a perfect match for smartphone (and Micro Four Thirds) camera sensors, which means your images can display across the entire screen. Sensors in DSLRs and many mirrorless cameras have the slightly different 3:2 aspect ratio, so those images will have a black border along two sides. The mismatch is subtle enough, however, that we think some people won’t even notice it. In any case, this display is a better fit than what you’d get on a frame with a 16:9 aspect ratio.Images shot with DSLRs and mirrorless APS-C cameras have a 3:2 aspect ratio, so unless you crop them you’ll get thin black borders (like those shown here) along two sides of the screen.Like Nixplay’s other cloud-connected frames, the Seed uploads your photos to the company’s servers and then sends them to your frame. This arrangement lets you manage the frame from Nixplay’s well-organized website, but that requires you to connect to your home Wi-Fi network and to the Internet.

You can organize your image uploads and create playlists for your frame from your Web browser. Step-by-step instructions on the Nixplay website make connecting the frame to your Wi-Fi network quick and foolproof.Step-by-step instructions on the Nixplay website make connecting the frame to your Wi-Fi network quick and foolproof.In light of that used home-networked devices as unwitting proxies, we asked Nixplay about its security protocols. Nixplay’s chief of software told us: “We don’t expose ourselves to public access through the user’s router like a lot of off-the-shelf SoC devices which haven’t been locked down. This means the user’s router or PC would need to be compromised first before our frame could start to be attacked. We have our own two-way protocol (via WebSockets) we use that is encrypted and we don’t open up access to our frames’ OS.”The Seed has no ports for inserting a USB stick or an SD card, so you’ll have to add images via your Nixplay account, either from the website or through an app. Once you've connected the frame to your Wi-Fi network, you can add images directly to your account from your phone’s photo library via the company’s free app.

You can also use Nixplay’s well-designed website to upload images from your computer as well as from social media and cloud storage accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, Flickr, and Dropbox. Linking these accounts is easy: Just click a button to log in and then grant access, and your photos will automatically populate the Nixplay Web page. Nixplay’s cloud service comes with a 10 GB storage limit (a paid upgrade gets you additional storage), but this limit applies only to photos you upload from your computer's hard drive or your mobile device.

Images synced via cloud services like Facebook, Google Photos, or Flickr do not count toward this limit. Once logged in to the Nixplay site, you can upload images into an album (center).

You can then drag those images onto a playlist (right) to send them to your photo frame.The Nixplay Seed includes 8 GB of internal storage, enough for about 25,000 smartphone photos, which means you’re unlikely to run out of room. The Seed will still display already loaded images even if it’s disconnected from the Internet, though you’ll have to connect to the Nixplay website to add new photos or make any changes to your playlists. You can control the Seed’s operation using either the included remote or the phone app. Nixplay lets you organize your photos into albums, which you can then combine into playlists and send to your frame. Send multiple playlists to a frame, and you can choose to display images from a specific playlist or the entire batch of photos. Another option is to simply play the most recently added photos. And if you own multiple Nixplay frames, you can send separate playlists to each device.

If you own multiple Nixplay frames, you can send playlists independently to any frame.You can also display images sent from family and friends. Upon creating your Nixplay account during setup, you receive an @mynixplay.com email address.

Add contacts to your Friends tab, and any image files they email to that address will show up on the Nixplay site (as will folders shared over cloud services like Dropbox), where you can add the photos to a playlist. By default Nixplay prevents delivery of image files from people you haven’t added as contacts.Once images are uploaded to your frame, you can customize the image duration and transition effect for your slideshow. For images not in a 4:3 aspect ratio, you can choose to display them in their entirety along with black borders on two sides or have them cropped to fill the entire frame.

From the Nixplay app (iOS version shown here), you can adjust frame settings such as the playback mode and sleep schedule (left) or use your phone as a remote (right).Using a cleverly designed semirigid USB power cable that doubles as a stand, the Seed can sit in either portrait or landscape orientation to suit your image files, something you can’t do with frames that have built-in stands. A motion sensor lets you conserve energy by putting the display to sleep after you leave the room. In addition, you can set a daily sleep and wake schedule for the display, a useful feature if you have the frame in your bedroom and light from the screen would keep you awake.

The Nixplay Seed uses a cleverly designed semirigid power cable as its stand, allowing you to make adjustments to the angle of the frame and to switch between portrait and landscape orientations. Flaws but not dealbreakers. Nixplay frames do not support automatic slideshows from social media accounts and previously did not support any shared folders. Recently, with shared Google Photos and Dropbox folders. Though Google Photos syncing is managed through Nixplay’s mobile app and Dropbox is managed by logging in to, this is still a welcome development.If you want to manually add photos from Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr, you need to log in through nixplay.com, choose the Photos tab and then the Social Media sub-tab where you can register your social media accounts. Then you’ll be able to see those photos and add them to one or more of your Nixplay playlists.

Nixplay says that it is working on adding syncing for social media photos in the future. Long-term test notes.

If you can do without the convenience of wirelessly uploading images, Nixplay’s will save you a significant bit of cash and still provide all of the other benefits of our top pick. You get the same great screen, motion sensor, and remote, along with easy setup and operation. The Advance is the highest-rated photo frame on Amazon as of this writing, with a 4.5-star rating across more than 530 user reviews. We tested the 10-inch model, but the Advance also comes in 8-, 12-, 15-, and 18-inch versions (the last has a 16:9 aspect ratio).The lack of Wi-Fi means you’ll be loading images via SD card slot or USB port.

The Advance has no built-in storage like our top and budget picks, but Nixplay helpfully includes an 8 GB USB stick to get you going. If you’re a Mac owner, note that you should format SD cards in your camera rather than your computer in order for the Advance to read them, and if you use your own USB stick, it should be in the MS-DOS (FAT) format. The Nixplay Advance has ports for an SD card, a USB stick, and headphones.

Nixplay includes an 8 GB USB stick, shown here.If you’re a Mac owner, note that you should format SD cards in your camera rather than your computer in order for the Advance to read them, and if you use your own USB stick, it should be in the MS-DOS (FAT) format.Aside from the lack of Wi-Fi and, of course, the inability to use the Nixplay app to manage your photo playlists, the Advance delivers an experience virtually identical to that of our top pick. And although we haven’t tested every one of the company’s frames, our experience so far shows that Nixplay has put the most effort into a pleasant user experience, with a setup process simple enough that even technophobes shouldn’t have a problem.

We think most people should use Nixplay models as a starting point when shopping for a photo frame.(Potentially) free alternatives. If you have an old tablet stuffed in a drawer, it’s hard to beat free.If you own an iOS or Android tablet that isn’t getting much use, you already have a capable digital photo frame if you’re willing to spend some time sorting through slideshow apps and finding an appropriate stand. We set up a new —one of the least expensive brand-name tablets you can buy—to see how easy it would be to use as a photo frame. Measuring just 7 inches, its screen is smaller than the others we tested, and its 16:9 aspect ratio means that images shot with your phone or a traditional camera won’t fill the screen, at least not without significant cropping.The 16:9 aspect ratio of the Amazon Fire is a major mismatch with most photos.The 16:9 aspect ratio of the Amazon Fire tablet means that none of your photos will fill the frame without significant cropping, instead showing thick black borders on two sides. The Fire lacks a built-in slideshow function, and Amazon’s app store is much more limited than those of Google and Apple. We tried the app store’s two most popular slideshow apps, and after an hour—much of it spent spent trying unsuccessfully to connect either of them to Amazon’s Prime Photos cloud storage service—we used a Flickr account and were able to create a basic slideshow.

Best Photo Frame Software For Mac

You lose features from our top pick such as a motion sensor for turning off the display, one-step transfer of images from your phone, and easy sharing of photos between family and friends. But if you have an old tablet stuffed in a drawer, it’s hard to beat free. And if you want to use a digital photo frame only occasionally, like for family gatherings around the holidays, the Amazon Fire can be an inexpensive way to pull that off, while having a tablet for portable reading and Web browsing during the rest of the year. The competition.

The field of frames with a resolution of at least 1024×768 pixels and a photo-friendly 4:3 aspect ratio is small, and both features and screen quality can vary widely, a fact that made it easy for us to dismiss several models.We were all set to recommend the as a bare-bones, budget pick, but it's been plagued with stock-availability issues. If you can track one down, it’s a more affordable alternative to the Nixplay models, but it has some drawbacks. It works only in landscape orientation, and it has a menu system and remote that recall 1990s computing, but the Ever Frames V08 offers decent picture quality at about a third of the price of our top pick. Because it has no Wi-Fi capability, you must load images via the frame’s SD slot or USB port (but only from one or the other at a time).

The Ever Frames V08 has inputs for an SD card, headphones, and a USB stick, as well as a Mini-USB port for cameras. Like all frames with a one-piece stand design, the V08 can sit only in landscape orientation.The V08’s screen is smaller than that of our top pick, and because this panel uses older TFT technology, it lacks the vibrant color and rich contrast of the Nixplay frames—but it’s still good enough for most people. Setup and operation are straightforward but slow, due to an antiquated menu interface that requires extra steps like hitting the OK button to move between main menus and submenus. The V08 can display non-4:3 images with black borders or scaled to fill.

You can set the image duration for a slideshow from three seconds to an hour, but unlike our main picks this frame has no motion sensor to automatically put it to sleep (though you can set a timed sleep and wake schedule). The L-shaped rear of the frame housing the input ports doubles as the stand, which means the V08 can sit only in landscape orientation. The Ever Frames V08’s remote is a throwback to an earlier era—but it works.The is a recently announced high-end digital photo frame currently available for preorder. The ability to lift it off the base and use it like a tablet seems handy, as does its method of combining videos and images into automatic collages. But its $500 price tag and 16:9 aspect ratio put it out of the running for what we’re looking for in this guide.The is a marginally more affordable high-end frame; it will be available for $300 when it eventually ships.

We’re interested in seeing how it will let owners curate “channels” of content from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, and privately shared images—but its awkward shape and its inability to work in portrait orientation are enough for us to say that it probably won't be worth the significant price premium.The was disappointing. It has a shape and design nearly identical to that of our budget pick, but in our tests its screen quality was noticeably inferior, with flat washed-out colors and a narrow viewing angle.

More surprising is that, unlike our budget pick, it doesn’t even come with a remote: You’re stuck navigating the on-screen setup menus by blindly pressing buttons located on the back of the screen. Extremely frustrating.The comes in a 15-inch size, includes an 8 GB SD card, and uses the same menu-interface software as the Ever Frames V08. The display let us down, however. The one in our unit shipped with a dead pixel near the center, and for reasons we couldn’t determine, some of the images from our memory stick exhibited strange distortions (the same USB stick worked fine in every other frame we tested). Even assuming we got a defective unit, the very limited viewing angle of the Neo’s TFT display was a dealbreaker. With the frame tilted just a few degrees in the vertical direction, severe bronzing made seeing the image nearly impossible.

With this frame up on the mantle, a small child looking up at it would see nothing useful.Though now discontinued, we did consider two frames from Electric Objects. Electric Objects targeted the and its follow-up, the, at the art connoisseur rather than the photo hobbyist. The huge, 21-by-13-inch Full HD–resolution screens were meant to be wall-mounted and work only in portrait orientation. For $300 at the time we first wrote this guide (a hardwood finish would set you back an additional $100), this luxury frame can, in addition to showing your own work, display a curated selection of art from museums like the National Gallery of Art for a $10-per-month subscription.

Although this frame offered an interesting way to bring art to your home, it’s far too niche and expensive for most folks.We had high hopes for the, with its tantalizing promise of culling your iPhone’s camera roll and automatically selecting images to display, ignoring those that are blurry or low-resolution, have red-eye, or contain nudity. Surrounded by an elegant anodized aluminum frame, the 2048×1536-pixel display is stunning—in our tests it easily had the clearest, sharpest picture of any frame we tried. Our images had the clarity and pop of slide film on a lightbox.We were disappointed by a lack of functionality, however. While writing the initial version of this guide, we were surprised to find that the Aura Frame didn’t even have a slideshow option. Shortly after we published, that feature was added, so kudos to the company for incorporating feedback. To change images manually, you have to use the companion iPhone app (which of course means your phone needs to be with you) or stand within 2 feet of the frame and wave your hand in the air. Not only is the latter a tedious way to find a particular image, it also looks ridiculous.

Aura touts the frame’s ability, through use of its motion sensor, to show you a new photo each time you enter the room, a claim that is misleading at best. Yes, the Aura shows a new photo each time it wakes up, but even if the room is unoccupied, the frame won’t go to sleep unless the room light is dim. In my home office with three large windows, the Aura Frame went to sleep only in the evenings.In practice, the smart selection feature was more trouble than it was worth. I spent 20 minutes waiting for the app to analyze images in a camera-roll folder of 365 images—far more time than I would have taken to select photos manually. And if you choose to display a square or portrait-orientation image with the frame positioned in landscape orientation, for example, you have no fit-to-frame option. Instead the image displays full frame but cropped.

Black borders aren’t always ideal, but they are a better solution than digitally chopping someone’s head off. And every other frame we tested offered us the choice of how to handle orientation mismatches. Again, the Aura Frame produced a better-looking image next to all the other frames we saw, but with a price tag more than double the cost of our top pick, it currently has too many usability shortcomings to recommend. Having said that, the company appears to be responsive to usability concerns and has the ability to address them via app and firmware updates. We’ll keep an eye out for future improvements and adjust our recommendations as necessary.The is similar to our Wi-Fi–enabled top pick but retains USB and SD ports, plays video files, and comes with a traditional stand (which you can use in both portrait and landscape orientation). Its screen is a bit less bright than the Seed’s, however, and it comes in just two (versus three) sizes, the 8-inch model being the only version with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

The is the company’s flagship model, with only minor differences from our top pick. A metal (versus plastic) frame offers a classier look, and the Iris employs an ambient sensor to match screen brightness to the room lighting. It also uses a noise sensor—rather than a motion sensor—to put the display to sleep. But at the time of this writing, the 8-inch model cost about $30 more than our 10-inch top pick.

We just don’t see the added features as worth paying the extra cash or settling for a smaller screen.The frame has a 10-inch touch-sensitive display and offers twice as much internal storage (16 GB) as our top pick. It supports common video file formats and has a built-in rechargeable battery. Unfortunately battery life is rated at only four hours, meaning you’ll need to have it plugged in for everything but the occasional manual browsing of images. Our chief complaint, though, particularly for a model touting its iPhone and Android compatibility, is that the screen’s 16:10 aspect ratio is a mismatch for any smartphone or traditional-camera photos. Uncropped smartphone images sent to the frame are enlarged to fit, meaning you’ll lose some image area on the sides, a problem that our top pick avoids by using a 4:3-aspect-ratio screen. And unlike our top pick, which offers direct support for many cloud services such as Facebook, Google Photos, and Flickr, the PhotoSpring frame seems to work only with iCloud, and only through your iOS device’s previously established iCloud setup.

What to look forward to.