I'm thinking of buying a digital photo frame for my elderly parents for XMAS. I've tried to read up on them but the information is somewhat overwhelming.

I'm looking for one in the 9" or 10" range. I like the idea of loading up 500 or so pictures into it and putting it in slideshow mode for them. Someone mentioned on the Friday thread that you can put them on a timer so they come on in the morning and turn off at night. I'd like to do that.

How easy is it to load pics into them? I have tons of digital pics on my laptop hard drive. The pics are all in jpeg or bitmap format but they are at several different resolutions. Is that a problem?

Can I just create a folder on my hard drive, drag pics into it, copy that folder onto a USB jump drive and then insert the jump drive into the photo frame?

Do you have any recommendations on a particular brand and model (and where to get it)? Are there specific features I need to have?

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

I did the same thing last year. I think I bought 8" frames.... Whatever size they were I looked in the docs and it gave the pixel count. Let's say these were 800 x 640. So whatever size your image is, it will be remapped to your frame's resolution when it is displayed. So even if you have a 10MB image, it will only display as many pixels as the frame has.

So I have downloaded and use PICASA2 from Google. It is a free electronic picture library application. It has a function to make a "gift CD" of pictures. In the creation of the CD it offers a chance to resize your pictures. I chose the 800 x 640 resolution and the pictures are now all about 500Kb and not 6MB in size. I had an old 512MB camera memory card and it would fit nearly 1000 pictures on it.

I'm sure there are other sizing options or applications, but making them fit the resolution of your frame allows you to get many more pictures stored on a memory card. Good luck!

Chuck

Kodak 10.2" 800 x 600 - $99

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8954919&st=8954919+&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1216424110753

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2006 BMW M5 "Heidi" @ 109,000 miles
2005 MBZ C55 AMG "Lorelai" @ 165,000 miles
1991 MBZ 300E "Benzachino II" @ 165,000 miles
1990 MBZ 500SL "Shoshanna" @ 118,000 miles

(On the hunt for a good used M103 engine as of 6/10/23, PM me if you have one to sell!)

Thanks, both of you.

That Kodak looks good for A) price B) the user reviews on the Best Buy site and C) expected user friendliness. Several of the reviews on Amazon for other brands complain about the instructions and lack of support.

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

We picked up a few of these as gifts. Hope they work alright.

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11323128

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1985 380SE Blue/Blue - 230,000 miles
2012 Subaru Forester 5-speed
2005 Toyota Sienna
2004 Chrysler Sebring convertible
1999 Toyota Tacoma

Just checked again and this one is now selling for $179.99. What a load of crap. I hate pricing these days. What can justify an 80% increase in price in 12 hours other than it was a mistake yesterday? I should have pulled the trigger on it yesterday, but I wanted to see it in person this afternoon.

If anyone else sees this on sale for $99.99, please advise where.

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

http://www.buy.com/prod/philips-10ff2cmi-10-2-digital-photo-frame-white-philips-10ff2cmi/q/loc/111/205839817.html?adid=17653&dcaid=17653

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-Justin

91 560 SEC AMG - other dogs dd
01 Honda S2000 - dogs dd
07 MB ML320 CDI - dd
16 Lexus IS250 - wifes dd

it's automatic.

I ordered the 10.4" Smartparts model from Costco that raymr linked. (Thanks for the link!) $121 delivered. (BTW -- They charged me sales tax -- a first for me for an out of state web purchase.)

It came in yesterday and it was simple to set up. It only has 128 MB internal memory, but that may be sufficient for my needs. The frame came with its own transferring software that loads on your PC the first time you boot it up. This software includes an optimizing option that resizes the pictures when you transfer them. Each of my pictures that started out as 1+ MB files takes up less than 100K after resizing. So I should be able to load up to about 1000 shots on the frame.

The resolution on this frame is 800 X 600 and the images look really good in the frame. The 10.4" size should be perfect for my elderly parents.

I just started playing with this thing and the instructions are very basic. The only question I have so far is how to make it choose shots randomly for the slide show. Right now, it is playing them in the order I transferred them. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.