Digital photo frames have been a handy lockdown companion for many socially-distanced families, and now Netgear has made one of the biggest ones we've seen so far – the Meural Wi-Fi Photo Frame is a huge 15.6in display for your snaps and digital art.
Rather than a giant digital photo frame, the Meural is actually more of mini version of its Meural Canvas digital screens. The latter are available in 21.5in and 27in variants, with the new Meural Wi-Fi Photo frame matching their Full HD resolution.
Measuring 13.5 x 7.5in, the Meural can be wall-mounted, but is mainly designed to sit on your sit on your mantelpiece and cycle through your favorite photos.
These can be added via the updated Meural app, which lets you schedule albums and playlists of snaps from your phone's camera roll. Other members of your family can also add their photos via the app, with albums synced from your camera roll.
Like other premium photo frames, the Meural has built-in sensors to monitor ambient light and adjust the screen's brightness. It also supports gestures like 'wave up', which will show you the location and date of the photo, taken from the file's metadata.
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Mini art gallery
One potentially handy feature that we're looking forward to testing on the Meural is its auto-cropping functionality – this crops your snaps (taking into account subject matter like faces and people) to help avoid black borders.
According to Netgear, you'll be able to squeeze around 1,200 photos on the frame, thanks to its 8GB storage. Further justifying its premium price tag are a wood grain trim, support for video playback (including iOS live photos) and access to the Meural Art Library.
The latter calls itself the "world's largest art streaming service", with over 30,000 pieces of digital art. You get 100 of these with the Meural Wi-Fi Photo Frame, but will need to subscribe to get access to the full collection. That costs $8.95 per month (around £7 / AU$12 per month).
The Netgear Meural Wi-Fi Photo Frame itself costs $299 / AU$499.95 (UK pricing is TBC, but that converts to £230). It's available to buy now in the US, and will likely be available worldwide from early October. Look out for our full review here very soon.
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