AuraReviews of auraframes.com

Have 2 frames,both electrical connections (plug) changed. Had to buy 2 cords for $46 . Not very happy !

I recently purchased an Aura Frame (Walden model) for a business project that involved setting it up at a trade show. The deadline was tight, so I rushed to Best Buy to grab the frame. I chose the Walden because of its size, but when I arrived at the exhibit and opened the box (I’m in the USA), I discovered the plug was for UK customers. What followed was a chaotic four-hour ordeal that felt like a circus—except it wasn’t my circus, and they weren’t my monkeys. Our local Best Buy didn’t have any more frames in stock, except for the display model, which had the correct cord. I suggested they let me borrow the cord for the trade show, but they flat-out refused. Their only solution was to send me on a 40-minute drive to another Best Buy, which wasn’t an option given the time constraints. Frustrated, I went home, dug out some converter plugs, and managed to get the frame running—though the setup looked ridiculous, with tape holding everything together. Once the frame was operational, the issues didn’t stop. The hotel where we were exhibiting only had basic public Wi-Fi, and the frame was so poorly engineered that a “WEAK INTERNET SIGNAL” banner appeared across every single photo. Worse, the photos displayed at 15-second intervals, which is far too slow for a fast-paced trade show environment. There’s no option to adjust the interval to 5 or 7 seconds, which would have been far more practical. I couldn’t help but wonder what the design team was thinking. Why would anyone think it’s a good idea to plaster a banner on every photo? And why limit the display intervals to such an impractical duration? The frustration didn’t end there. The fact that Aura shipped a frame to the USA with a UK-style plug is baffling. How does something like this pass quality control? On top of that, I had to reach out multiple times—through their website, contact forms, and other channels—just to get the issue addressed. It felt like I had to push and push to get any resolution. This entire experience left me embarrassed for Aura Frame’s engineering and customer service teams. I wish I could approach my business life with the same laid-back, laissez-faire attitude they seem to have. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this product or the company, and I certainly won’t be shopping at Best Buy again after their lack of support.

The Good: The screen resolution and brightness are amazing. The photos come alive on this frame. The power cord is good quality and long enough for most/reasonable installations If you are purchasing it for a parent and you want to manage their photos on it, it’s probably a perfect solution as long as you don’t expect much for photo management. It does have an option to view slideshow by date or shuffle. It has “Unlimited” photo uploads to their cloud service so you don’t have to worry about managing SD card sizes and all. I put Unlimited in quotes as like everything that is always subject to change. The Bad: First and foremost, it automatically crops all portrait photos to fill the aspect ratio even though during the setup, it asks you how you would like to handle the edges of photos that don’t fit (i.e. if you are displaying a vertical photo and your frame is horizontal – do you want the edges to simply be black?). I can’t understand why they thought this was a good idea. When I take photos, I like to see my entire photo, not some randomly cropped photo. The worst of this is it is done by default with no way of turning the “Feature” off. The only way to un-crop each photo is to select each one, see if it was cropped, and if so, select the button to un-crop it, hit save, and proceed to the next photo. Not that bad if you only have 3 photos. Second, the advertisements lead you to believe it works seamlessly with Google Photos and their Albums. It does not work at all seamlessly. For example, you can indeed select an album in Google Photos and upload it to the frame. But when the album arrives, you now have to select each individual photo and add it to the frame. Why would I as a user need to do this? And to make matters worse, why on earth don’t they have a “Select All” button? Also the “Auto Add” feature works to the extent that if a photo is added in the Google album, it will indeed be added to the frame, but again, it will not show in the slideshow unless you manually hunt for the added photos, and turn this on individually. This is inexcusable! Thirdly, I was led to believe that I could have various albums such that I can turn them on / off easily so if we have guests that want to see the grand kids, I simply turn the others off and turn the grand kids on. That would be such a basic function, but it is missing completely. There is no web interface for the frame such that I can use my laptop to sort things out – it all has to be done on the phone via the app which I hate. I know the young generation can handle this without an issue but I sure wish I could use my laptop screen. A lesser concern, but one none the less: The thought that I am dependent on the Aura Cloud worries me for 2 reasons. A) If Aura gets purchased by another company all bets are off for that “Unlimited Photo Storage” which is currently included with the frame. And B) If Aura simply goes out of business (which is a real possibility, especially if they don’t fix their software for basic functionality) then the frame will be useless. Of course, this is always the big trade off with having to manage your own memory card which applies to any device dependent on a cloud service.

The frame seems good and easy to use. BUT there is no ability to create playlists or galleries. All photos on the frame are shown. It would be nice to set up playlists of photos for different themes, say holidays or family, and be able to switch between them. I should have done more research before I bought it. Disappointing.

The screen quality is excellent but you really would expect a premium photo company to display photos correctly - unfortunately that's not the case. Be warned - all portrait photos will be shown cropped (so you'll only see the middle bit of the image). You can manually recrop each image individually but clearly that's not practical!

Frame quality is great, picture is awesome & delivery is fast. But all ruined by the buggy and overly complex gifting process which often fails. Meaning gifts are ruined on delivery. Endless family tech support with elderly parents. Spent a lot of money on three frames to avoid this as they had the option to pre-set. But when it fails it makes resetting and getting it going an absolute nightmare. Really wanted this to be awesome but needs a lot of work on the onboarding process. Gutted