Lenovo Smart Frame

Feb 2024 update 2: they got the back end fixed, so back to three stars. If local photos worked I’d give it four. Feb 2024 update: app not working again, so down to one star again. Will update if and when they get it fixed again. …but awfully frustrating that the smart frame turns into a very dumb frame when the cloud services are down. It’s Lenovo so you’d think it’d be pretty solid… but so far over a couple years of ownership I’ve seen at least two multi-day outages?!?! And some bugs and flaky UI decisions and limitations and I’ll be generous and give it three stars for now (May 2022).

In general it works well enough to customize your frame the way you want. There are some strange limitations though. - Why only 3 custom albums? This seems like an arbitrary limitation. I can understand maybe 3 active albums on the frame at a time since it would be cumbersome to cycle between them, but even the inactivated albums count? This means I have to constantly delete and recreate album setups as I want to cycle content. Makes no sense. If there has to be a limitation, maybe something more like 10. - I don’t understand how family sharing works at all. Any email address I enter doesn’t work, and entering a phone number says “invitation sent” but I never get anything. - Would be nice to link multiple Google Photos albums, but I understand maybe I’m in a minority here. I’m getting around this currently bu sharing albums across my accounts, but videos won’t share to this frame :( - I use my frame on very low brightness so it looks more like printed art on the wall, however every time I cycle power on the frame it starts in super bright mode, which is annoying.

What a frustrating experience! The frame looks great! That is if you manage to get your photos on it… There is no direct way to upload photos. Instead you have to use Google photos. So I create an album and I tell the frame to display it.. easy enough? Not so fast! For some reason the photos on the frame update at random times. There’s no reason for it. It’s impossible to add a photo and then see it on the frame. You have to wait for google photos to first add it to the specific album which doesn’t always happen. Then… you have to wait for the frame to decide to actually show that pictures and that happens pretty randomly, maybe after a few minutes more likely after hours… same thing if you want to remove a photo. Take it off the album and voilà… hours later it may be gone from the the frame maybe not… honestly this shouldn’t be so complicated.. how about and upload button in the Lenovo app???