Author: Beatrice Bisais Page 15 of 32

Bea is Nixplay's Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

6 Fun Ways to Integrate Family Photos Into Your Home Decor

By Beatrice Bisais

On January 17, 2017

In Home & Interiors

Photos are meant to be seen – especially the ones that document our favorite moments with the ones we love. Whether that’s a candid photo from your last roadtrip, a special selfie with the one you love, or a beautiful family portrait, displaying your family photos can add warmth and depth to any room.

But sometimes, figuring out how to tastefully display your family pictures so that they add, rather than distract, from the overall decor can be a challenge. Here are 6 tips for displaying your family photos to their best advantage.

Create a gallery wall. Hanging lots of pictures in one large grouping can be a great way to display family photos, especially if you want to keep the pictures relegated to one spot. There are many ways you can lay out your photo wall, but here are some general guidelines:
- Create a focal point by having a center photo at eye level.
- Mix and match images of different shapes, sizes, and orientation.
- Choose mats of matching colors to keep your display from looking chaotic.
- Consider selecting one larger photo to serve as an anchor for the rest of your family photos.
Arrange images in stand-up frames on a shelf, end table, or bookshelf. When working with standing photos, mixing up your frame styles, sizes, and colors is key. Overlapping frames can add depth to the display, and keep it from looking bland.

To add variety, integrate a digital frame into the mix, like the new Nixplay Iris. Change the photo as often as you like or send new ones to the frame while you’re away. The stylish design and silk-metal finish means the Nixplay Iris can be integrated perfectly among your gallery and art frames.
Be selective. When it comes to pictures of our children, it can be hard to choose a few favorites from the hundreds we have. However, it pays to select just a few of your absolute favorite images to display, rather than overwhelm your room with countless photographs all competing for attention.

If you do have a large collection of photos that you just have to display – say, from your recent travels to an exotic location, for example, or your family’s trip to a theme park – opt for smaller sizes. Use multi-photo frames or choose an unconventional display, like hanging them with clothespins on pinboards or bulletin boards.
Choose antique frames for an unexpected touch. Hanging contemporary family photos in antique frames adds a unique, unexpected touch to your photo displays. Take care when matching your frames with images – you want the look to be interesting, but not jarring.
Mix vintage family photos in with current ones. One fun way to add some history to your family photo display is to mix in vintage photos of relatives. Why not show off your grandparents’ wedding portrait, or an image of your great-uncle when he was a little boy? You could even scan and upload them to your Nixplay Iris cloud WiFi frame for a “vintage family” playlist.

Including these photos can not only add visual interest – it can also lend a narrative to your display. And you might be surprised at what good conversation starters old photos can make.
Repurpose vintage windows, wooden pallets, or other items to create your own unique display. The best way to exhibit your family photos is the way that best reflects you and your family. If you’re crafty, there are all kinds of tasteful and uncommon displays you can create to show off your photos.

When making your display, you definitely want to consider how the materials will fit in with the rest of your decor, as well as the photos you plan to include. Some display ideas might look perfect with certain wall colors, frame styles, or picture formats, but not others.

Displaying your family photos can be a wonderful way to add some personality to your home. To make the Nixplay Iris a part of your decor, all you have to do is order it through our U.S. store.

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

Why You Should Be Better at Staying in Touch This New Year

By Beatrice Bisais

On January 17, 2017

In Special Moments

What are you going to try to do better this year? Are you going to exercise more? Lose weight? Save more money?

These are all great goals, but there’s another that you may want to add: being better at staying in touch with friends and family.

While family members are scattered farther than ever these days, thankfully, there are also more ways than ever before to stay in touch: social media, email, texting, and of course, Nixplay WiFi Cloud digital frames, which allow you to send pictures immediately to your loved ones’ frames.

And there are lots of reasons to do so. Staying in touch with the ones you love means you’re building a strong social network, which has many proven benefits. Here are just a few of them.

Better quality of life

Most of us know without even thinking about it that having a strong social network means a better quality of life.

Humans are social creatures – without social interaction, we wither away. That’s almost the literal truth, as countless studies have shown that isolation, especially in old age, is connected with shorter lifespans and poorer health.

Having a positive social network, on the other hand, in the form of friends and family whom you can count on in times of need, has been linked to better health, better mental functioning, and longer life.

Less stress

Strong social networks of friends and family also contribute to lower levels of stress, as well as better handling of stress when it occurs.

The simple fact of knowing that there are people who care about you, and who are willing to help shoulder your burdens, can help a great deal in relieving everyday stress. When something major does happen, as it does eventually for all of us, you can rest easier knowing that your support network will be there to help you get through it.

An important point, however, is that this support network must be built in advance. It’s got to be maintained. We never know when the difficult times are going to strike – it’s important to stay in touch with those we love not only so that they can be there for us, but so we can be there for them when they need us, too.

Better brain health

Studies have proven over and over that positive, regular social interactions help preserve our mental functioning. This becomes especially important as we age and cognitive decline begins to be a possibility.

Research by faculty at the University of Michigan, for example, have uncovered a link between positive social relationships and cognitive performance.

In a follow-up study, this was further proven. Study participants were assigned to one of three groups: one was supposed to socialize, one solved puzzles, and another watched TV. Afterwards, members of each group were tested on cognitive performance, and the group that socialized scored the highest.

Better mental health

Brain functioning is one thing, but how about your overall mental health? Staying in touch with friends and family and building your social support network is also strongly linked to better psychological well-being.

Keeping loved ones close can help you prevent loneliness, give you a feeling of security, and increase your self-esteem, all of which are vital to preserving your psychological well-being.

Now that you know the benefits of staying in touch, what are some easy ways to do so? Texts, emails, and phone calls are great methods, but you can also use our Nixplay WiFi Cloud digital frames as a way to build and retain relationships.

Give one to Grandma, so you can send her pictures of the grandkids’ birthday parties and sports games.

Get one for your own home, so your kids can check the frame for new images while you’re traveling on business trips.

If you’re an avid traveler, you can also create photo playlists on your frame that let you better share your trips and experiences with the ones you love. For more on this, read our post “How to Create a Meaningful Photo Playlist to Share Your Trip with Loved Ones.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

Photo Playlist Ideas for That Nixplay Digital Frame You Got for Christmas

By Beatrice Bisais

On January 12, 2017

In From The Nixplay Team

The presents have been opened, the tree taken down, and the ball has dropped in Times Square.

But if you’re one of the people who got a Nixplay WiFi Cloud Digital Frame for Christmas, the fun isn’t over yet! You’ve still got to put together your photo playlists.

Creating playlists out of your hundreds, even thousands, of photos, can be overwhelming. What themes should you use? How should you organize them?

That’s why we’ve put together these simple photo playlist ideas.

Family celebrations

Photos from birthdays, bat mitzvahs, graduations, and other celebrations can create a fun, joyful playlist that’s sure to lift your spirits even on days when you’re feeling glum.

One of the nice things about putting all these images together, rather than splitting them up by person or time period, is that it allows you to maintain that celebratory feeling from start to finish. Your celebration playlist is just as perfect for quiet evenings at home, when you’re feeling reminiscent, as it is for family get-togethers.

Love and marriage

If you’re part of a couple, you may want to create a playlist that celebrates your love. You could include pictures from early in your relationship, milestones like engagements, weddings, and anniversaries, and other fun, memorable moments from your life together.

Or perhaps you want to celebrate the love and commitment of your loved ones, as well. To do that, include pictures of couples among your friends and family whom you’re close to. It’s a wonderful reminder of the power of love, especially around Valentine’s Day.

Vacations and travel

Do you travel a lot, either for work or for pleasure? Instead of creating separate playlists for each of your trips, consider making one that displays the best moments from your trips throughout the years.

That may mean that swimming with sea turtles in Hawaii shows up next to eating hot peppers in Thailand, but that will just make the playlist more interesting. Of course, if you’ve got mountains of wonderful pictures from a particular trip that you want to showcase, creating a playlist for that trip is a great idea, too.

The Story of Us

Why not create a playlist that tells the story of you, whether that’s you and a spouse or partner, or you and your family?

You could start with wedding pictures or pictures of you and your partner when you were first dating. Then move on to milestones like your honeymoon, births of children, your first house, family vacations, and more. To help you decide which pictures to include, think of the playlist as a narrative of your lives together, and look for images that illustrate that story.

Playlists for children (or pets)

If you’ve got kids or babies, then they’re likely the subjects of most of your pictures. The same is true if you have pets. So if you’ve got hundreds of pictures of your little darlings, put them to good use in a photo playlist for your Nixplay Iris, Nixplay Seed, or Nixplay Edge.

You could go chronologically if you have older children, when the passage of time will be highly noticeable. If you’re giving a Nixplay WiFi Cloud Digital Frame as a gift to a child who’s graduating high school or college, these kinds of chronological playlists can make a wonderful addition.

Another option is to split the playlist up into themes: you could go by season, for example, or by holiday.

If you need some help navigating how to create playlists, or how to do anything else on your Nixplay WiFi Cloud Digital Frame, take a look at our library of how-to and support videos here.

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

How to Show Your Loved Ones You Care – Even if You Can’t Be There

By Beatrice Bisais

On January 10, 2017

In Special Moments

50 years ago, it was rare for a family to be spread out across the four corners of the earth. Today, however, it’s becoming a lot more common.

Children graduate college and spend a year teaching in Japan; our parents retire and decide to fulfill a lifelong dream of living in Paris. Even our high-schoolers are becoming more and more comfortable with looking at colleges and universities across the country or even abroad.

While this can be hard on families, the good news is that technology has made it easier than ever to stay in touch, and to maintain strong, rich relationships with the ones we love. If you find yourself struggling to find meaningful ways to show your faraway loved ones you care, take a look at this list.

Use your social media cues to spur real-life action

You know how Facebook tells you your friends’ birthdays? An easy response to that is to write “Happy birthday!” on your friend’s wall and call it a day. It’s nice for someone to get that acknowledgement, of course, but ultimately it’s not terribly meaningful.

A nicer gesture is to write someone a personal message, whether through Facebook or email. But the best thing to do is to take that virtual reminder as an opportunity to go buy a birthday card and stick it in the mail.

It sounds like such an easy thing to do, but most of us seem to keep our social media and real-life lives rather separate. This same principle can be applied to all kinds of situations – when you see a friend or family member post a status update about feeling overwhelmed or sad, give them a phone call or send a little note.

It’s these sorts of sincere, thoughtful gestures that can really enrich your relationships, and help you stay close and connected no matter how far apart you are.

Use the Nixplay app to send friends and family photos as they happen

One of the best things about smartphone photos is that you can share them with loved ones immediately, making them feel like they’re a part of the moment.

With the Nixplay app, you can send photos to your loved ones just as quickly, except that instead of showing up on your mom’s or grandmother’s little smartphone screen, they’ll greet her on her Nixplay WiFi Cloud frame.

Just think what a nice surprise that will make when she walks into the room and sees the photo from your son’s championship soccer match, which he won just minutes ago, framed so beautifully.

Plan a fun virtual activity together.

No one said staying in touch had to involve nothing but Skype conversations and texting.

Instead, get creative and come up with a fun, virtual activity to do with your loved ones. If you’re a mom or dad who travels for business, set up a scavenger hunt for your kids before you leave. You can schedule a time for them to start it, and feed them clues via FaceTime, Skype, or by sending photos. When they find the objects, have them send you a picture of them with the object before getting the next clue.

If it’s a dear friend you’re missing, try scheduling virtual versions of events you would ordinarily do together – a movie night, for example, or even a wedding or baby shower.

You may feel a little silly at first turning on Google Hangouts so you can chat with your bestie while watching the Golden Globes, but give it a few minutes and you’ll be amazed at how natural you’ll feel.

Being away from friends and family is difficult, but there are lots of ways to make the distance feel a little less daunting. For more on staying in touch with loved ones, read our post “How the Nixplay App Can Keep Your Family Connected.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

Google’s New PhotoScan App Helps Preserve Your Memories

By Beatrice Bisais

On December 27, 2016

In Photography

Many of us have gone through the tedious process of scanning our hard copy photographs in order to save them as digital files.

Whether you’re scanning just one to share on social media for #ThrowbackThursday, or going through an entire photo album to preserve the pictures for posterity, the process isn’t exactly seamless. You have to scan the photo, save it on your laptop, and then email it to yourself or share it via social media or a file-sharing site if you want to be able to access it on your other devices.

What does this result in? If you’re like us, it means you have a whole bunch of half-scanned photo albums sitting around.

This isn’t exactly an ideal situation. What would happen if you had a fire or flood? What if an album disappeared into the jumble of stuff in your attic, not to be found until you moved? Indeed, what’s the point of photographs if you never look at them?

At Nixplay, we think your photographs are worth sharing, whether they’re 60-year-old pictures of your grandmother or digital images that you took five minutes ago with your smartphone.

That’s why we think Google’s new app, PhotoScan, is rather cool.

How PhotoScan works

PhotoScan allows you to scan and upload your physical photos with just your smartphone, instead of needing a scanner and laptop. You can see how it works in this short video by Google:

Why scan your old photos?

There are plenty of people who think scanning old photos is a waste of time, or something they just don’t want to do.

Many of us love having these physical photographs – the way they feel, the way they look, the way flipping through a photo album can conjure up so many memories of a specific time. Why would you want to replace that with photos you see on a computer screen?

We agree! Digital versions of your images can never replace the physical copies that you and your family have spent hours of quality time poring over. Instead, think of those digital images as a kind of back-up plan. If something catastrophic happened, and you lost all your family photos, you’d still have the digital images preserved intact.

And here’s something else to think about. What if you wanted to share an old photo with a friend or family member who lived far away, even halfway across the world? You could mail it, of course, but that takes a long time and isn’t always reliable.

Scanning offers advantages in these sorts of cases. For one thing, you get to keep the original, instead of sending it on its own to a destination hundreds or thousands of miles away.

For another, you can share it instantly and in just a few steps. Take this example of sharing a photo using a Nixplay WiFi Cloud digital frame.

Use PhotoScan to scan your physical photograph.
Upload the image to your camera roll, Google Photos, or a social media app.
Open the Nixplay app.
Select the app you want to access, and the photos you want to share.
Select the people or frames you want to send them to.

And you’re done! That incredible 75-year-old photograph of your grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day is now showing up on the Nixplay Iris you gave them for their anniversary. Won’t that be a lovely surprise?

Preserving your digital photos

Of course, just because you’ve scanned and saved an old photo, that doesn’t mean that it’s truly been preserved.

Just as we all used to save our pictures in physical albums to keep them organized, we’ve got to exercise similar organizational discipline with our digital images. Experts recommend saving your digital pictures to albums, and then saving them on a flash drive (or even saving them on two separate flash drives – one you keep at your home, and another in a safe deposit box or another secure place.

Organizing your digital photos is a whole other undertaking – and when someone comes up with an app to make that easy and instant, we’ll let you know! But for now, we’ve at least got something that makes the first step, scanning, a whole lot easier.

For more on preserving your precious family photos, read our post “The Future of Family Memories.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.