Aura produces digital picture frames that are easy to set up and have excellent screens, and its latest model, the Aspen ($229), is no different. The frame’s 12-inch screen is gorgeous, with wide and accurate colors and an anti-glare finish that makes pictures look lifelike. It’s a bit pricey and its simplicity is a double-edged sword since you can’t manually adjust its brightness, but its picture quality really makes it stand out against cheaper brands. Like the 9-inch Aura Mason ($199), the Aspen earns our Editors’ Choice award for digital picture frames.

Design: A Slim Frame for Tabletops

The Aspen is incredibly slim for a desktop digital picture frame, measuring less than an inch deep at the thickest point compared with two inches for the Mason. You’ll need a few inches of desk space behind the frame for a metal foot that clicks into the back in one of two positions, letting you place the Aspen in landscape or portrait orientation (it will automatically detect which way the frame is standing). The foot makes the Aspen feel more stable than the Mason, which has a built-in stand and can easily be knocked over with a nudge.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

From the front, the Aspen features a thin black or clay-colored outer bezel with a 1.3-inch off-white mat around the screen. The bezel has a matte, almost rough finish, with two smooth touch bars for interacting with your gallery on the edges of the frame, one running lengthwise and the other widthwise.

The Aspen’s matted screen and thin profile make it look suitable for wall mounting, but that isn’t in the cards; it’s designed to be placed on a desk, shelf, or table, with no included hanging hardware. If you want a digital picture frame you can put on the wall, check out Aura’s 15-inch Walden ($299), which comes with a mounting kit. The Amazon Echo Show 15 ($299.99) smart display doubles as a digital picture frame and is another good choice for wall mounting.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

App and Features: Simple Setup for You and Your Loved Ones

Setting up the Aspen is easy, whether you want to use it for yourself or give it as a gift. Download the Aura app (available for Android and iOS) and create an account, then select whether the frame is for you or someone else. The app will instruct you to turn it on and then automatically starts searching for the device.

If it’s your frame, you can add photos directly from the app. If it’s a gift, the app will let you scan a QR code on the box and then preload the frame with photos and a gift message that will appear as soon as the recipient scans the same code after connecting the frame to Wi-Fi. You can also prepare the frame for gifting without having it in hand. The app can generate a simple alphanumeric code linked to the gift message and photos you want to put on the frame. Then, you can have it delivered, and the recipient can simply enter the code you generated when they receive the frame.

Wi-Fi is necessary either way, as the Aspen relies entirely on cloud storage, like all of Aura’s frames. Aura’s cloud storage is unlimited and doesn’t require a subscription, but on the downside, the frame needs an internet connection to work. If you want an offline digital picture frame you can manually load with photos, the Skylight Frame ($159.99 for the 10-inch model) has onboard storage, though its screen isn’t nearly as nice.

(Credit: Aura)

Once the Aspen is connected and registered to the desired Aura account, you can start adding photos to it. The Aura app lets you send photos to the frame directly from your phone gallery, iCloud, or Google Photos accounts. The many albums I have on Google Photos didn’t show up in the Aura app, though, so instead of scrolling through my whole gallery in chronological order, I finished the setup process on my computer. I manually downloaded images from Google Photos to my computer and then uploaded them to the frame via Aura's web app, which made the process very easy.

You can let others upload photos to your frame as well and set up any gifted frames to accept pictures you want to send after it’s no longer in your hands. Each Aura frame also gets a unique email address for sending pictures directly without the app, though the sender will still have to be registered to an Aura account.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Aura supports BMP, HEIC, JPG, JP2, PNG, and TIFF picture formats, which you can upload from the mobile or web app. It can also play short videos from an unspecified list of formats, but these you can only upload from the mobile app. Videos you shoot on your phone should play on the frame, but downloaded media might not (and animated GIFs aren’t supported, either). Videos are automatically trimmed to 30 seconds, showing the first half-minute by default, but you can choose which part to show once a video is uploaded.

The touch bars on the edges of the frame let you manually swipe through photos, send a “like” to the app for the displayed photo (with a double-tap), exclude the displayed photo from the slideshow rotation (press and hold), or activate sound for any video clip that plays (videos are silent by default).

Ease of use is the main focus, and while there are several simple ways for you or a loved one to put pictures on the frame, there are very few options for adjusting how images look on the display. There are no picture controls for brightness, color balance, or even framing on the Aspen itself. This limitation can be a frustration if you want to tweak pictures as they show up, but it does keep direct interactivity with the frame very simple and prevents any user who gets it as a gift from accidentally making unintentional settings changes.

The lack of color balance controls isn’t a huge loss, as the Aspen seems to reproduce pictures very accurately. If you want to use any filters or make any tweaks to the color of your photos, you should do so before you load them onto the frame.

Brightness adjustments are automatic, which can be a nuisance. The Aspen adjusts the screen brightness on the fly based on how much ambient light its built-in sensor detects to ensure that whatever is on the screen can be comfortably seen. In a well-lit room, the display brightens. When the room gets dark, the display dims, and when there's no ambient light, it automatically turns off. This means that you can’t dim or brighten the screen to your preference. I quite like the just-barely-backlit look a good digital photo frame can produce, and it’s a shame that effect only really comes out when the lights are low.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

You won’t find many more settings in the app. It lets you manually rotate photos in 90-degree increments and crop or pillar/letterbox them if needed. If your images don't fit the screen’s 4:3 aspect ratio (or they do, but their orientation is different from the frame’s position), you can choose between cropping to fill the screen or pillar/letterboxing with your choice of black bars or blurry sections of the photo around it. Note that if you load the frame with a lot of off-ratio pictures, it will crop them automatically, and you have to individually set them to be pillar/letterboxed if that's what you prefer.  

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Aura is debuting two new software-based features alongside the Aspen: text captions and people search. Captions allow you to add text to photos on the frame. People search is a facial recognition feature in the Aura app that lets you filter your photos for pictures of specific people. These new features are available on all Aura frames via the iOS app, with Android support planned in the next few weeks. I tested the Aspen with a Pixel 8 phone, so I couldn't try these new additions. 

Display: Sharp and Vibrant

What really makes or breaks a digital picture frame is its screen, and that’s where Aura excels. The Aspen’s 12-inch, 1,600-by-1,200 LCD is beautiful and does justice to whatever art or photos you put on it. Color reproduction, in particular, is wide and accurate, rivaling many high-end phone screens.

Test photos I loaded on the Aspen look balanced and vibrant, almost matching my Pixel 8’s sharper 6.2-inch, 2,400-by-1,080 OLED screen in color range. Reds and yellows are just a touch less saturated on the Aspen, but not to any extent that you would notice without holding the two screens next to each other. Color and contrast remain consistent regardless of viewing angle, ensuring your photos won’t seem pale or indistinct even if you glance at them from the side. 

The frame’s picture is also nice and sharp despite having a third of my phone's pixel density (166 pixels per inch to the Pixel 8’s 428ppi). Test photos all look nice and crisp, and all but the smallest text on signs in backgrounds can be clearly read.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

An anti-glare finish on the screen further improves how pictures look on the Aspen. It all but eliminates most glare and effectively diffuses and scatters light sources directly pointed at the screen to minimize their influence. The matte finish and excellent off-angle viewability make pictures on the Aspen seem like they’re prints instead of images on a screen. That impression is how you know a digital picture frame is particularly good.

As mentioned, you can’t manually change the brightness level on the Aspen, and it will automatically bump the backlight to maximum if it thinks it has to fight with the room’s lights. Its maximum brightness is pleasant without getting outright blazing, but there's no mistaking digital photos for prints in this setting. The printed photo effect only really comes out in moderately to dimly lit rooms. Under the harsh overhead lights of PC Labs, the Aspen’s screen looks closer to one of the many monitors in the room than a framed print. Even so, the colors are more accurate and vivid than all but the higher-end gaming and content production monitors.