Review: Aura Aspen

My 2-year-old son thinks all photo frames are digital. He reaches up to the still frames in my parents' house to swipe to the next photo. While in some ways this sounds a little dystopian, I also find myself a little impressed. The Aura frame in my living room, however, has completely convinced my son that it's an analog picture frame. I can't even convince him to take a bath.

Aura's range of digital picture frames is the best out there. The Aura Carver ($149) and Walden ($299) are both top picks in our guide for a reason, thanks to their impressive design and matte screens that don't feel like just an iPad set up to flash photos at you. As of today, there's a new kid on the block: the Aura Aspen.

The Aspen sits right in between the Carver and Walden when it comes to size and price, and it packs the 4:3 ratio that's perfect for smartphone photographers. It's a great addition to the lineup, and if you're usually taking photos with your phone—especially if those photos tend to be vertical—this is the frame for you.

Frame Job

The biggest difference from the rest of Aura's lineup is the size. The Aspen has an 11.8-inch screen—larger than the Carver's 10.1 inches but smaller than the gargantuan 15-inch Walden frame. It packs the same anti-glare display you'll find in the Aspen and Walden, along with a 4:3 ratio and 1,600 x 1,200 HD display. That ratio matches most smartphone cameras, making it a great choice for your daily photos. Otherwise, the software inside is the same you'll find on all of Aura's displays, and you'll use the same app to control it.

The Aspen also has dual orientation, meaning it can sit in either portrait or landscape mode. This is similar to the Mason ($192) (which Aura is actually sunsetting this year), though you'll need to reach around the back to switch the stand's position in order to change the orientation. It only takes a few seconds to do this, though I think most people will pick a single orientation and focus on uploading photos to match it.

I chose vertical mode, since I usually take pictures in this orientation. For the few landscape shots I added, the frame included the entire photo with black bars above and below. If you're more of a landscape photographer, it's easy to put the frame in landscape mode instead to best suit your pictures. It's also a nice size for large rooms, like open floor spaces or large living rooms, so you can still see and enjoy the photo from various spots around the room. My parents have the 10-inch Carver frame at their house, and while I like it, it's much easier to enjoy my photos on the Aspen from across the room with the larger screen.

The Aspen and Walden sit on opposite ends of my living room, and at first glance, you might assume they're the same frame. The Aspen has the same ratio and screen size, just a smaller profile. And it's intended as such.

“It’s a cousin to Walden; they’re meant to be related but differentiated,” says Scott Chapps, Aura's chief creative officer. He says the goal was to add a size in between the 10-inch Carver and 15-inch Walden, and to create almost this set of matching luggage when looking at the Aura lineup, especially since the company has found the design they want to lean into. “We want it to be one decision: What size do I need?” says Chapps.

That's clear to see as you look at the lineup now, especially with Mason sunsetting this year and the Aspen taking on some of its features and a similar price point in between the smallest and largest frames. The Carver still has the basic design that's been around for a while, but the more expensive Carver Mat ($179) matches the mat aesthetic of the Aspen and Walden. Chapps and his team were excited to create a frame that really looked like paper matting, making it feel like an authentic photo frame from the design and texture. “We're really getting close to the holy grail: almost indistinguishable from analog,” says Chapps.

Fresh Features

A new frame isn't the only thing announced. Aura also added two new features, available across its frames: Text Captions and People Search. These have been available for a while in the Aura app, so if you're already an Aura user, you might have noticed these features already.

For text captions, Aura said the vision was to add context to photos, especially if you have multiple family members sending pictures to a frame. There's now a little “Leave a caption” box directly underneath a photo when you select it in the Aura app. The caption will then appear in the bottom left of the screen in a simple sans serif text. I don't love the font, but I do love the new option to add details to each memory. It works with emojis, too, ranging from your classics like a heart and party symbol to more random ones like a honeypot, and puts them in color.

People Search is an in-app feature to organize your photos by frequent faces. The filtering is local on your device, so the face recognition isn't getting uploaded to the cloud. It took my phone a while to finish processing my camera roll and the faces in it; I started it Friday morning and then forgot to check it again until the weekend, and it did finish the processing on its own with 10 faces it chose. Aura says the majority of processing happens within 10 seconds, but it took more than 10 minutes for me.

I was surprised by some of its “frequent faces” selections. The Aura app chose me, my husband and son, and three of my closest friends, which were all reasonable suggestions. But it also included a random friend of my son's, even though I have more photos of other friends, and two other random additions that were only in six photos on my phone. It also only included 36 photos of both myself and my son, when my camera roll (currently at 3,177 photos) has hundreds of photos of my son on it. It did prefer photos where you could see an entire face, but 36 was the max number pulled for a face during my testing.

All that said, there's one thing not in Aura's lineup: subscription fees or storage limits. The unlimited storage is a huge appeal to an Aura frame, and Aura knows it. It's really easy to upload images from all kinds of sources—your camera roll, your Google Photos, someone else's phone—and Aura wants to keep it that way. “You shouldn't have to pay to see your photos,” says a rep from Aura.

However, for this convenience you'll instead pay a higher price for the Aspen compared to other frames. Cheaper frames with storage limits and worse user interfaces can be under $100, but I'd much prefer paying a higher price now for a better design and experience that also comes with unlimited photos. The Aspen retails for $229, a little higher than the Mason it's essentially replacing, but the design, size, and capabilities make it worth it.