A digital photo frame is a logical gift or add on for anyone with a digital camera. Most consumers in the digital photo world have made the transition to digital cameras and digital pictures. Digital cameras like all consumer electronics have reduced significantly in price, increased in things like megapixels, optical zoom, and internal memory, and in essence eliminated the need to get pictures developed. Since anyone with a digital camera is accumulating a large amount of digital images, a digital photo frame that allows them to immediately show them off makes perfect sense.

Digital cameras gave people a freedom in photography that didn't exist with traditional film. With the ever increasing capacity of memory cards, most of us with a digital camera can eagerly take an endless number of digital pictures and not worry about running out of film or how costly it will be to get them all developed. Digital cameras make all of us snapshot happy.

The negative to this of course is that most of us gather a tremendous amount of digital images. Go on a family vacation and you could come home with a couple hundred digital images. These will get transferred onto a computer or laptop, where they stay forever and rarely get looked at. Sure we may print a couple (photo printers are also now very affordable) and put them in some traditional picture frames around the house, but the hundreds or thousands of others are stored away into oblivion.

That's why digital picture frames are predicted to be on such a steep growth trajectory. A digital frame allows you to load you digital pictures and display them in what looks like a traditional picture frame, but with an LCD display device in place of the glass. You can either simply transfer the memory card from your camera to the frame, or transfer photos from the camera to a memory card in the digital frame, and start displaying photos. Some digital photo frames have internal memory as well (no memory card needs to be added) and you can download straight from your computer – very flexible.

The main difference between a digital picture frame and a traditional photo frame is their dynamic nature. A digital photo frame can display many images in a slide show type format. They also come with plenty of display mode features to define how many images to display, type of transition, multiple pictures on the screen, and can also display videos and play music as well. Digital frames are consumer electronics that take picture frames to the next level.

Digital photo frames are great for around the house or in an office, and also make excellent gifts, especially if you preload with pictures from your camera. Your gift recipient will open the frame and immediately start seeing pictures they recognize. In addition, as your digital photo collection grows, you can keep new pictures on your screen, or a friend or family member's screen, so that you always have new pictures on the frame. Many digital photo frames now have wireless features that makes sending new pictures from your laptop to digital frame even simpler.

So if you have a digital camera (and who doesn't these day), pay attention because a digital picture frame will likely be an accessory that makes sense for you. Its time to start showing off all those digital photos you've snapped, and a digital photo frame is a great way to do it.