Looking for fresh and original Mothers Day gift ideas? If there’s one special thing that’s close to a mother’s heart (and even more to to a grandmother’s heart!) then it’s photos of the kids. A reasonably technically proficient mother normally has a never-ending collection of photos on her computer, prints on the walls, and always has a digital camera ready to take more.

So why not give a mothers day gift with a difference this year: A digital photo frame preloaded with her favourite pics of the family. It doesn’t have to be a super-large or expensive frame, a simple 7 or 8 inch digital photo frame will do. And these day’s they’re really cheap as well, so it this is one mothers day gift that won’t set up back too much.

And if you have mothers day pictures from last year, why not put them on as well, just to remind her how much the family cares about and appreciates her.

So here’s how you do it: Choose a frame that also runs on batteries, so you don’t have to worry about cords and wires. On Mothers Day, make her breakfast in bed, fire up the frame with the pre-loaded photos and put it together with the food on the tray. Imagine her face as the family walks in with the frame showing photos of everyone!

If you want to do something even more special, design a graphic with a special Mothers Day poem ior a Mothers Day quote, save as a JPG file, and load it on together with the other photos. It’ll be a nice touch for the poem to appear on the screen after two or three photos.

A mother living far away from her grandkids will appreciate it even more. Just pick a frame that’s simple to operate, because she’s bound to want to show off slide shows of them to all her friends!

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The problem with most digital photo frames is that, well, they look like digital photo frames. Most of the time the frames are tacky, plastic molds in colours that look more like they belong in an adolescent bedroom than hanging from your living room wall. ‘Interior design’ doesn’t seem to fit well into the vocabulary of most digital photo frame manufacturers.

Fortunately digital photo frame manufacturers PhotoVu is distinguishing them from the rest of the pack by producing frames that you’ll be proud to display in your home. And they’re not your average-sized, every-day eight inch frames either; they start at an eye-pleasing nineteen inches in diameter, so there’s no squinting at those magnificent wildlife photos you took on your last safari trip in Africa.

But here’s the best thing about PhotoVu frames – you design the actual frame yourself! Using an interactive tool on their website you can select your wall colour, and then select one of dozens of types of frames to see what will look best on your wall. It’s like visiting a digital photo framing shop! The frames are all great-looking ones that won’t look out of place in an interior decorating magazine, with the style of frames varying from elegant wood finishes to antique and post-modern.

If you’re a Rolls-Royce person who’ve not considered a digital photo frame because they’re oh-so-Ford, then PhotoVu frames are the once to consider. It’s the closest I’ve seen a digital photo frame come to the ambience that a conventional frame gives to a framed photograph. Using it to display the kids-in-the-backyard-pool pics will be a waste of the $800 or so a PhotoVu frame will set up back, but those black and white portrait studies you have lying around on a hard drive somewhere will look splendid.

Here’s a handy, simple piece of software to help you make the most of your digital photo frame. Think of those black areas appearing on the screen when a photo shows that’s not the same ratio as the screen. Yucky and distracting, right? I’ve just tried out FrameSize 2.0, a simple solution for resizing and cropping your pics to the required aspect ratio of your digital photo frame. You simply preset the ratio of your screen in pixels, and load a photo. A frame overlay will appear on your photo that you can move up and down, and when you’re happy with the crop, click Save and a copy of the crop will be saved.

You can also load more than one pic at a time and crop them one of the other, saving a bit of time.

As is the case with most freeware the interface won’t win any awards for user-friendliness and outstanding features, but FrameSize does what it’s supposed to do. Sure, you can do the same in any of a dozen other graphics and photo manipulation packages, but if you don’t already have your fancy shortcuts set up in Photoshop to crop your photos destined for your digital photo frame, give Framesize a try.

Wow! Digital photo frames just seem to be getting more and more unique features every day. Frame manufacturer Skyla has released the Memoir FS80 model digital photo frame that has a built-in scanner that you can use to scan your photo prints, and then display them on the screen.  This means you can now dig out all those old shoe boxes with black and white photographs of grandma when she was ten years old, scan them in, and display them on the Skyla’s 8 inch, 800×600 screen.

The scanner slot is located at the bottom of the Memoir FS80’s black frame, and has a ’scan’ button next to it. Once scanned the photo is saved on the frame’s 1Gb internal memory. The maximum size photo it can scan is 4″x6″ at a not-too-shabby 300dpi, enough for a very decent photo display on a digital frame or computer screen.

The Memoir FS80 has all of the mod cons that most other screen have: slide show transitions, sound, on-screen clock and calendar, and built-in external card reader. It also has a remote control and  can run video as well.  The 800×600  screen resolution is average, let’s hope they up the pixels soon.

This is the first frame from Skyla (the word is a derivative of the word “scilla”, meaning “spring beauty and warm hospitality”), and should be available from end April 2009.  The price is expected to fall within the normal cost of a mid-range digital photo frame.

You only have a limited budget but would still like to give that special someone a digital photo frame as a gift. Or may you just want to get your feet wet with digital photo frames but don’t what to spend a lot of money. Surprisingly enough, the low end of digital photo frames are not expensive at all! Here are a pick of some of the best cheap digital photo frames available at some really keen prices. Still too much? Why not consider a digital photo keychain.

Samsung has debuted two new digital photo frames that improve on previous models. The SPF-107H is a 10-inch LCD screen with a 1024×768 resolution, and the smaller SPF-87H is an 8-inch, 800×600 screen with 1Gb of internal memory and the normal external memory card slots. Features that set them aside from the back features include:

• Internal rechargeable batteries: You don’t have to rely on an external power source
• Both frames can be used as secondary computer screens. Simply hook them up to a USB port, and you have a two screens on your computer.

The prices are in line with most Samsung digital photo frames in this class, going for between $103-$150 each. The newly announced screens will be available in May 2009, so if you’re in a hurry to get a Samsung digital photo frame, consider the SPF-85H, which has similar specifications to its latest version – at a better price.