Product Review: CEIVAShare Digital Photo Frame

I had the pleasure of reviewing CEIVA's CEIVAshare photo frame over the past two months. The CEIVA digital photo frame system includes a frame along with a one-year membership to CEIVA's photo sharing service. When users upload the photos to a frame's CEIVA.com account through one of a variety of methods, the frame will display those pictures within 24 hours (with a phone line) or instantly (with a WiFi connection).
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The CEIVAShare Digital Photo Frame is the perfect way to keep relatives far from home updated with your family's photos. All users need is a telephone line, no internet is even required, although one can receive pictures faster with internet connectivity. As long as the sender of the photos has internet access, CEIVA has developed numerous ways to send pictures to your loved ones. Photo: CEIVA.com

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I had the pleasure of reviewing CEIVA's CEIVAshare photo frame over the past two months. The CEIVA digital photo frame system includes a frame along with a one-year membership to CEIVA's photo sharing service. When users upload the photos to a frame's CEIVA.com account through one of a variety of methods, the frame will display those pictures within 24 hours (with a phone line) or instantly (with a WiFi connection).

This is an outstanding gift for loved ones who might claim ignorance (or fear!) of other popular photo sharing services, such as Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook. It couldn't get any easier: Anyone with access into the CEIVA (pronounced SEE-vuh) frame's account can upload pictures to the account from a variety of sources: CEIVA.com, Facebook, Picasa, iPhoto, or through your mobile device straight from a camera phone.

Our frame has been sitting proudly in our living room but will soon be shipped off to my parents for further testing. This picture was edited with the CEIVA.com photo customizer. Photo: Patricia Vollmer.

CEIVA is a company that formed in 2000 by a group of former Disney executives that had a new innovation: the digital photo frame. They seem to do an excellent job keeping right on the forefront of new social networking and mobile-app technology. Learn more about the company here.

You can order CEIVA frames from their website, or from other online retailers with whom CEIVA has arrangements, such as Amazon. If you consider this product, take a moment to look at their multiple product specials, along with their specials for populations such as military members.

What Comes in the Box

  • CEIVAShare Digital Photo Frame with 8-inch LCD high resolution screen
  • Remote control
  • AC Power Supply
  • CEIVA Modem Adapter (for a telephone line)**
  • Phone Extension cord
  • Phone line splitter
  • Quick start guide and quick tips sheet

**This frame does NOT include adapters for broadband or wireless connectivity. These can be purchased separately for $19.95 each. My review included a wireless adapter to test.

Setup

Easy peasy! The quick start guide is easy for anyone to understand and is no different than connecting a cordless telephone: Plug in the AC power, plug in the adapter for the telephone line/broadband connection/WiFi, and power up the frame!

The back of the frame has a cover that opens up to reveal the outlets for the AC power and data line adapter. The USB port in the back will accept the telephone modem, broadband adapter, or WiFi adapter. Photo: Patricia Vollmer

The guide has photos to help the user with the setup screens after the frame powers on.

If the user is internet-capable, the next step will be to log into CEIVA.com, set up an account, and register the frame with its serial number. This will connect the frame to the CEIVA account and allow photos to be uploaded.

If the user doesn't have internet, he/she simply has to call CEIVA (Monday-Friday during business hours) where customer support personnel will walk the user through registration.

From this point, from the CEIVA.com account users can invite others to contribute to the frame and arrange existing photos into albums. The day I registered this frame, I invited my sister to contribute pictures. It was fun to see pictures from her uploaded the following morning.

There are also CEIVA Channels available that users can subscribe to: Third party companies such as The History Channel, The Weather Channel, ESPN, The New York Times, and Mashable offer single pages that rotate through the frame with the photos with sports scores, weather forecasts, news headlines, recipes and horoscopes.

So now you're ready to receive some photos! How do you receive photos? Let us count the ways!

CEIVA.com

The most direct way to add photos to the frame is through a CEIVA.com account. Anyone you invite to add to your frame can set up a CEIVA.com account and upload photos. For those familiar with uploading to a photo sharing service, it's very familiar.

The CEIVA.com photo uploader is similar to other popular photo sharing services. In the case of the CEIVA frame, however, you have the choice of where to send the photos. If you account includes more than one frame, this is where you can choose which frame to send it to. CEIVA also allows you to e-mail, text, or post photos to Facebook and Twitter. Screen capture: Patricia Vollmer

In the GUI the user will have the chance to pick and choose where he/she wants the photos to be displayed. The user does NOT have to necessarily send everything exclusively to the CEIVA frame. The company appears to be striving to be a one-stop shop for all photo sharing. Which is why they have an "eDestinations" service that allows you to use many other locations to share photos besides just the frame.

Users can add recipient email addresses, cell phone numbers, additional frames, and auto-generated email addresses to send photos to the frames, and set timing of uploads all from the CEIVA.com photo sharing page.

The CEIVA photo sharing website also has a fun editor that allows users to add captions and borders. I'll get to that later in this review.

One of the things that made me fall in love with the CEIVA photo frame concept was how well the company is embracing several popular social networks and connectivity methods to allow users maximum flexibility with their favorite photo editing and photo sharing programs. Check out all these other ways to get photos to your CEIVA frame!

CEIVA Sender for Facebook

CEIVA has a Facebook photo uploader application. Facebook users can install the app and then can easily upload Facebook albums to the frame.

This busy mom appreciates CEIVA's attempts to keep you from having to duplicate efforts too much. With the CEIVA Sender on Facebook, users can upload to the frame directly from their Facebook accounts. Screen capture: Patricia Vollmer

iPhoto Plugin

We here in the Vollmer house use iPhoto for most of our photo management. To share our albums with relatives, we typically use a Picasa iPhoto plugin to send the photos to Google's Picasaweb, complete with the correct dates, times, and captions. CEIVA allows for the same thing with their iPhoto uploader plugin.

The CEIVA iPhoto plugin allows easy exports to the frame straight from iPhoto for Mac. Screen capture: Patricia Vollmer

Similar plugins are available for the standalone Picasa program and Adobe Photoshop Elements. There's also a generic photo uploader that works on Windows computers.

CEIVA Snap for iOS and Android

This app is available through the Apple App Store or the Android Market. This allows users to upload pictures directly from their iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Android. This app also includes the photo editor (see below for details) that allows captions, color effects, and greetings to be added to the photos before uploading to the frame.

I had a chance to test CEIVA Snap for the iPhone and it was a great easy way to upload pictures on the spot. Screen capture: Patricia Vollmer

Direct Email

Similar to apps such as Facebook and TwitMail that provide you with obscure email addresses that allow you to post directly to their apps, CEIVA does the same thing. Through CEIVA.com you can receive an email address that you can share with anyone to email photos to the frame.

In fact, through CEIVA's settings, you can even set up custom email addresses for each and every one of the albums on your frame.

Other Ways to Share the Photos

As I mentioned above, a membership into CEIVA's PicturePlan doesn't not just involve uploading pictures to one of their frames. Any pictures uploaded to CEIVA.com are available to share via email, text message, and through Facebook and Twitter.

I tried all of these methods, and my only concern is that if you choose to share a group of photos via text message or email, expect one photo per message. For the 11-picture album I tried sharing, I had expected one text message, or one email, with a link to a full album (similar to Picasa, Shutterfly, or Flickr's photo sharing). That's not the case. The photos are individually directly texted to your phone, and a single link for each and every photo is sent to your email inbox. If you are on limited text messaging, this could be an issue.

Photo Editors

The photo editor capability exists in full on the CEIVA.com photo sharing, and a partial version is available on the CEIVA Snap for mobile devices. This is so much fun! CEIVA provides borders to cover several holidays and special events (weddings, birthdays, first day of school), fun cartoon-like balloons to add captions, "stickers" to add to photos, along with a few simple color filters.

This is one of the first pictures I had sent to the CEIVA frame in mid-August. I sat on the beach, took the photo with my iPhone, edited it on the spot, and uploaded it to the frame. It was in the photo rotation on the frame by the time I got home. Nice! Screen capture: Patricia Vollmer

Here's a super silly picture for you. My oldest son had a "funeral" for "dead verbs" this past week at school. He's supposed to find alternate words to "is," "are," "was," etc. He wore black to school. I used the CEIVA photo customizer's sticker feature (the hat on his head), caption balloon feature, and border feature. I also used the black and white filter. All at once. This was all done on my iPhone. Photo: Patricia Vollmer

So Now What?

Now that I've had a chance to play with the frame (for about six weeks), I'm sending this frame to my parents to keep. We plan to keep up with the subscription also. My vision is to follow up on this review with my parents' perspective. They don't use social networking, and typically rely on my emailing them Picasaweb albums to keep up with the kids' pictures. Sometimes I fall a little behind on those. The CEIVAshare will help with that wonderfully.

What if you receive one of these frames and choose not to renew the PicturePlan? All hope is not lost. There are slots that accept CF I, CF II, SD, MMC and MS cards. This will still serve as a standard non-connected photo frame.

The CEIVAshare retails for $127.99 and includes 40 pictures per day to upload to the frame, one year of PicturePlan photo sharing service, and a lifetime warranty. The wireless adapter that I also tested retails for $19.95. These products are available at CEIVA.com or through Amazon. Volume discounts are available through CEIVA.com, as well as promotions for military, educators, and corporate needs.

A complimentary sample of the CEIVAshare and CEIVA Wireless Adapter were provided for review purposes.