Our Favorite Digital Photo Frame Will Sprinkle Your Life With Serendipitous Joy

My brother bought us the Aura Carver in fall 2021. At the time, I was a little skeptical. The last time I’d used a digital photo frame was at least a decade earlier, and you had to physically transfer photos from a computer to the frame with a USB stick. The whole experience was janky and annoying.

Not so with the Aura Carver.

Setup was a breeze. I simply downloaded the extremely intuitive Aura app on my iPhone, paired my phone and frame, and connected my frame to my Wi-Fi network (via my phone). It took less than five minutes.

Adding photos from there is a cinch. You simply hit the app’s Add Photos button (duh), and select anything from your phone’s photo library with a simple tap.

I’m not regimented about it, but I typically take a few minutes to add scores of photos every few weeks. (Indeed, I just took a six-minute break from writing this article to briskly add 175 photos from the past six weeks. It was beyond simple and also kind of fun.)

I now have 3,456 photos, spanning several years, cycling through my Aura frame. I’ve set photos to shuffle every five minutes, but you can have them shuffle as frequently as every 15 seconds or as slowly as every 24 hours. In my experience, though, five minutes is the Goldilocks, just-right number.

I also use the very nifty Photo Match setting, which displays side-by-side photos and, in Aura’s words, “creates moments of delight by pairing related photos, such as the same person, the same event, and more.” In my experience, Photo Match is indeed good at this. Like so:

You can use a little swipe bar on top of the Carver to zip along to the next photo, but you don’t have to. Everything is automated in the app, without the need for physical controls.

And it looks terrific. My photos of a photo frame probably don’t do it justice, but the 1280x800 display is sharp, and the actual frame looks very stylish and natural sitting on our dining room banquet.

It’s hard to overstate how heart-warming and lovely it is to be reminded daily of memories and moments from my family’s past.

I glance at the frame, and there are my in-laws reading a book to my son.

I walk by the frame to get a glass of water in the kitchen, and there’s my daughter flying a boogie board like a kite at the beach. That photo is next to one of me and the kids playing our patented “wave runners” game, where we stand on the waterline boastfully taunting waves until they get close to our feet and we scurry away in feigned fear.

I look up and see my goggles-wearing son doing a science experiment in our kitchen. And that’s next to a photo of him and his sister encased in a 5-foot-high bubble cylinder at his fifth birthday party in our garage.

I amble by the frame on my way to the bathroom, and displayed are my kids in St. Patrick’s Day green next to a photo of my excited and slightly nervous daughter, who’s about to go down a rather intense water slide.

There are my summer-tanned kids hugging stuffies they won on the Wildwood boardwalk in New Jersey.

There’s my 4-year-old son standing on the winner’s podium after the New Rochelle Turkey trot. Next to that is a photo of my kids gently helping their 1-year-old cousin stand.

And on and on and on. My day is better, my spirits are lighter, and my life is just a little bit richer with these daily reminders of love and fun.

One of the best features of Aura frames is being able to share photo-uploading access to your frame with friends and family, as well as uploading your photos to their frames.

Because my family is officially in the camp of Aura evangelists, we have shared access across many frames—with my brother’s family in New Orleans, my in-laws in Ohio, my kids’ 95-year-old great grandmother in Australia, and on and on.

This means that members of our extended family can delight us by adding their photos to our frame, and we can do the same with theirs. It’s very easy: When I add photos to our frame, I simply tick one more box to simultaneously upload them to Great Grandma’s frame in Melbourne.

It’s an extraordinary gift—and, honestly, a privilege—for a simple digital photo frame to connect us this way. Across continents and oceans, across generations and languages, we can immediately share images and memories that bring smiles to our family’s faces the world over.

This article was edited by Catherine Kast and Erica Ogg.