I’ve got a lovely digital photo frame. With many of these types of new technologies, I’ve waited for quality to improve and prices to drop.

This one works best from an SD card (as it’s more discreet) – I’ve put in a spare 2 GB one that I had. This gives me loads of rooms for photos based on the resolution of the screen.

So, how to best get my photos onto the frame.

First of all I used Picasa to go through my photos and find those I wanted. It’s a shame there isn’t an easy way of moving copies to a new folder, so I had to do this manually. But from this I built up a seperate folder containing the photos I wanted to use.

Next, I re-dimensioned them with Image Cropper – I tried a number of cropping programs but this worked the best. The ratio of the frame does not match my photos, and this allows me to adjust the are of cropping for each photo. The only downside to this program is that it doesn’t seem to retain all of the configuration – even though there is an option to load/save configuration options.

Anyway, this program let me one-by-one crop to the right ratio, as well as change the pixel size to match the screen.

Once all of this was done, I wanted to randomize the photos in some way (and possibly rename them too). I’m sure there’s an easy way, but I came across VIPBase – a collection of image and video processing utilities. Amongst these is a batch file renamer, which includes a button to randomize the files before being renamed.

The results were copied onto the SD card and have worked a treat.