Convert4Frame

Although I was probably the last person I know to move from film to digital photography I have now fully embraced the new format. In fact I haven't really used my film camera at all since I bought my first digital camera.

The one downside to a digital camera is that I print far fewer photos than before and so the photos I take tend to sit neglected on my computer. To try and solve this problem and to allow me to appreciate the photos I have been taking I went and bought a digital photo frame. Not knowing how much I would use it I opted for the cheapest one Amazon had to offer at the time and ended up with a 7" frame from ATMT (model number 7TFTDPF). For the price I paid it is an excellent frame and has been great for showing off the photos I take.

The only problem with the frame is converting the photos to fit the screen size. The frame is widescreen and requires the photos to be both cropped and resized before it will show them correctly and make full use of the visible area of the frame. Now you can do the resizing and cropping in any image editor but it becomes tedious if you want to convert a number of photos at once.

So given that I'm a software engineer I set about solving the problem by developing a small program to do the tedious work for me! The result was the aptly titled Convert4Frame application. In essence this application allows you to easily define the part of a photo you wish to display in the frame and then resizes and crops the original for you. To use the application simply it direct from this page.

Currently it is designed to work with the 7" frames from ATMT, but it should correctly resize your photos for any digital frame with a native resolution of 480x342 (or any multiple of). Let me know in the comments if it works with your frame, or if you have a frame which requires different resizing/cropping let me know the details and I'll add support for it.

Update (06/02/2010): I've moved the code into a publicly accessiable SVN repository, see here for details.

Update (30/12/2007): I've made a number of small changes which should deal with the few cases in which the image wasn't correctly filling the display area (basically the image is now scaled down to the frame size).