While I was in Japan I had a great idea for a xmas present for my parents – this year after a steady slow decline due to Alzheimers my Mum has moved into a care home, and one thing she still enjoys doing is going through family photo albums. Relatedly I remember a photo project called ‘I photograph to remember’ and that exactly applies to my Mum – the photos serve as her memory now…
So my great idea? A digital photo album!

I did some searching while in Japan but found the best option seems to be the NIX digital frames, which I then ordered ex Amazon. Nix make two types of digital picture frames: normal frames which display photos stored on USB thumb drive, and cloud frames which display photos stored in the cloud and accessed via wifi.

As I wanted my Mums frame to be fairly bullet proof, I ordered the 15D which is USB only and is a 15″ frame in 4×3 aspect ratio, natively 1024×768… I started loading photos on it today and it looks great!

I decided to try out a larger landscape format one, so I ordered the 17B for myself. It is 17″ size and natively displays 1920×1080 and is also just USB based. XPAN photos look great on it!

So far they seem easy to use – you can choose the orientation, manually browse & display photos or set a slide show going, with settings for the time each photo is displayed and the transition between photos. Resolution seems pretty good, although of course you get what you pay for… pay more and you can get similar rez to the mac retina screens.

One aspect of the settings that will be useful in my Mums case is that you can set it to auto start at a set time, and switch off at a set time. Another option is that it will switch on when it detects movement.

Seems a well thought out device, and eg for family who are living in a different city or country the wifi/cloud models would be a great way to update from a distance.

I set my parents Mac up so that any photos attached to emails get stored in the same directory as used by the OSX screensaver, which I set to display photos. So my Dad can still enjoy that at home, but this self contained picture frame is going to be great for my Mum.

ps if you or anyone you know is going through the process of a friend or family member with dementia of any kind, I can not reccomend this book highly enough: CONTENTED DEMENTIA – I came across mention of it on reddit, ordered a copy and read it, then ordered a copy for every member of my family. There are no easy answers but having a better idea of priorities and tactics for helping has been invaluable!