Digital Frames : getting the best from them

bob_a_builder

Digital Frames are very popular at the moment, buy one, stick the card from your camera in and view the pictures.

Well yes they will do that. But ...

Seems to me the most popular use of them is for relatives to see pictures of the kids etc, but unless you were very careful about 'framing' the subject when taking the picture, the images of little Jimmy can be quite disapointing, Especially given the small 7" size of some of the frames, either its too small for Gran to make out or because it was a portrait picture and the digital frame is landscape, you have to choose between showing it stretched or normal - either way it'll look wrong.

However with just a little bit more effort you can make (nearly) all the images appear in full screen and focus in on the important part of the picture

1st, you need to download "Image Cropper" from HERE

Then set it up to suit your Digital Frame, mine was 8" linx, so i needed the following settings in Image Cropper
set the "output image" to 720x480 NTSC
set output to "Jpeg"
set Aspect ratio to "6x4" - Landscape

(of course users of other frames may need to experiment to get the right settings)

Now just use the "Open" button to select an image
Image is displayed, now using the framing tool shown over the picture you can drag it and size it to concentrate on the area of the picture you want to see on the digital frame
Then use the "Save As" button to choose a folder to store the cropped image in
Now repeat as many times as required

Once you get the hang of it you can whizz through the photos, then copy all those cropped photos to your memory card and off you go.

The other advantage of doing this means each image will only take between 100 and 200KB so you'll get hundreds on a very small card compared to copying the original 1 or 2 MB images on to the card

And I think you'll find the results look so much better than just putting the originals on it as is - well worth the extra effort !!.

p.s theres also a batch mode, which may speed things up even further.

and thanks to Paul Marshall for making such a useful bit of software freely available.