When digital photo frames first became available, I bought one for my parents. It still sits in their living room and when you turn it on, it displays a slideshow of the same pictures I originally loaded onto the CompactFlash card that is plugged into the frame.
Now that wireless digital photo frames are becoming the “next big thing,” I’m interested in getting one for myself, but I’m not sure any of the models available satisfy my (modest) requirements.
It seems these wireless frames mostly work by having some kind of stupid e-mail address assigned to the frame. You send an e-mail message with a picture file attached and, within a few minutes, more or less, the picture shows up on your digital photo frame.
This seems lame to me. Here’s what I want:
The digital photo frame should be able to connect to a local file server via SMB/CIFS, HTTP or FTP and display all images hosted at a specific location. For example: ftp://myfileserver/pictures/.
The digital photo frame should run an HTTP server so I don’t have to use the on-board buttons or the soon-to-be-lost miniature infrared remote control to set it up. Every VoIP telephone, print server, and a gazillion other network devices seem to all have an HTTP configuration interface, so why not a wireless digital photo frame?
Am I asking too much?
