What is the best digital photo frame app?
The Pix-Star Snap mobile app is arguably the best digital photo frame app on the market. It’s exclusive to Pix-Star’s digital frames and offers one of the best feature sets. Pix-Star Snap doesn’t charge any extra subscription fees or one-time payments to gain full access to its features – unlike Nixplay and Skylight’s mobile apps.
Pix-Star Snap doesn’t require each user to create an account, meaning anyone in the family can use the app to send photos to any Pix-Star frame. All pictures are sent to each receiving frame’s unique and dedicated email address. Pix-Star Snap lets you send up to 250 photos to several receiving Pix-Star frames at the same time.
You can also send entire folders and collections from your phone’s gallery – making it easy to share photos in bulk. Since you can share to any Pix-Star frame via its email address, it’s easy to keep everyone in the family up to date with the latest pictures.
Pix-Star Snap lets you send 2-minute video clips and audio recordings to any of your Pix-Star frames. These video clips are selected from your phone’s gallery and the audio recordings are done live in the app. It’s a great way to share special moments with your loved ones beyond just photos.
With Pix-Star, every photo sent from the Pix-Star Snap mobile app is automatically saved both to the cloud and locally on the receiving frame. You can manage local storage using a Pix-Star frame’s media library. Cloud storage is managed via the frame’s web dashboard and is accessed from the Pix-Star web interface.
Note that you can create multi-frame control groups to manage and control up to 25 Pix-Star frames from anywhere in the world. Here you can adjust their settings, start slideshows, manage cloud storage, update firmware, and much more.
P.S. Pix-Star’s remote configuration feature is coming soon to the Pix-Star Snap mobile app (in development at the time of this writing).
How do 3rd party digital photo frame apps work?
3rd party digital photo frame apps are only recently becoming more popular. Many newer generic and Chinese digital frame brands use 3rd party mobile apps instead of offering their own mobile app. While this helps these brands lower their costs, it comes at the cost of versatility.
3rd party digital photo frame mobile apps like the Frameo mobile app are used by several newer generic and Chinese brands. It’s a relatively good mobile app that offers basic features and functionality to as broad a range of frames as possible. As a result, the app isn’t very feature-rich. You can only send 10 pictures at a time, video clips are limited to just 15 or 30 seconds, and there isn’t much remote configuration support.
We generally recommend buying a digital photo frame with a unique mobile app. These apps are customized to suit that specific frame and almost always have a more advanced and versatile feature set.
Do all digital photo frames have an app?
Not all digital photo frames have an app. High-end digital frames like the Pix-Star, Nixplay, Skylight, Dragon Touch and Aura frames are among the top digital frames with a mobile app. Most cheap and even mid-range digital frames don’t have mobile apps or Wi-Fi connectivity. They tend to only offer internal storage and USB or SD card support for offline photo-sharing.
We highly recommend buying a digital photo frame with a mobile app. They make photo-sharing simple and efficient for the whole family. You can share photos in bulk, send short video and audio recordings, and some apps even let you remotely update and adjust your frame’s settings.
While digital photo frames with an app are a bit more expensive, it’s almost always worthwhile. The features and functionality they offer make them far better suited to the modern home and family than any mid-range or budget digital photo frame.
You may want to avoid digital photo frames that lock full access to their mobile app behind a subscription paywall (e.g., Nixplay and Skylight). Competing frames that aren’t subscription-based tend to offer more functionality and features without charging anything extra.
Can I send videos with a digital photo frame app?
With the Pix-Star Snap digital photo frame app, you can send 2-minute video clips and audio recordings to any of your Pix-Star frames from anywhere in the world. Include these video clips in slideshows alongside photos, set the frame to mute them by default, and more.
Pix-Star saves all video clips sent to your Pix-Star frame via the mobile app to the cloud and locally. This happens automatically. Manage cloud storage using the Pix-Star web dashboard and manage local storage on each frame via “Media Library” (found on the frame’s home screen).
Can I remotely manage my digital photo frame with an app?
The Pix-Star digital photo frame app (Pix-Star Snap) is currently adding a remote configuration feature. It’s under development at the time of this writing and releases soon. This feature lets you adjust some of your frame’s settings, though isn’t quite as versatile as the web interface’s remote configuration feature. It’s a great way to manage your frame’s basic settings from anywhere in the world.
Note that only a few digital photo frame apps offer a remote configuration feature – with some even charging extra subscription fees to unlock all of the app’s features. We recommend avoiding these digital frames as they struggle to offer similar value for money to what you’d get with Pix-Star and other competing non-subscription-based digital frames.
Does a digital photo frame app cost extra?
Nixplay and Skylight are among the most popular subscription-based digital photo frames with an app. These frames charge a recurring annual/quarterly/monthly subscription fee to unlock the frame’s full features. For example, the Nixplay and Skylight Plus premium subscription unlocks their full mobile app, expands their limited cloud storage, allows multi-frame control groups, video and audio playback, and more.
The main issue with these frames is that they don’t offer many features that aren’t offered by competing for non-subscription-based digital photo frames with apps such as the Pix-Star. Pix-Star offers free-for-life cloud storage, full access to their mobile app, multi-frame control groups, remote configuration, a web interface, web albums to import photos from social media, and much more.
