Like a gazillion other people, my mom received one of those digital picture frames this year as a Christmas gift. Now, I have to admit that I had seen these things displayed in stores and instantly written them off as worthless junk. Why not just download the pics and view them on your PC, which already comes with a gigantic digital picture frame called a monitor? I've reconsidered my position, however, after seeing the results that a friend of mine achieved by scanning old family photos and creating a themed display. This is a very nice application, even if the digital frames themselves are ridiculously overpriced (Why should a 7" digital frame cost as much as a freaking 15" monitor?).

Since my mom's not too computer savvy (sorry, Mom), and since I already own a good flatbed scanner, I convinced her to grant me temporary custody of "The Album". As you might guess, The Album refers to a photo album. This particular tome weighs in at around 20 lbs. and contains every Moening family related daguerreotype, snapshot, Polaroid print, instamatic photo, etc, since the invention of the photographic medium. Needless to say, The Album is the most jealously guarded and prized possession of the collective Moening family. There are already some preliminary indications that The Album will be the subject of an ugly family dispute on that sad but inevitable day when Mom's estate is dispensed with. I suspect that many others have similar Albums in their own families.

In case you've never seen one of these digital frames, they consist simply of a small LCD screen combined with one or more ports for the storage media that contains the photos. The more expensive frames might accept a USB device, or even possess some built-in internal memory. However, the less expensive models - like the one my mom received - just have a port for an SD memory card that is the universal, on-board storage device for all digital cameras. Presumably, you use your digital camera to take pictures of the annual Christmas brawl, pop the SD card out of the camera, plug same into the back of the digital picture frame and - PRESTO - instant, sensational Christmas gift!

As some of you may have figured out by now, it was my intent to flout the theoretical digital picture frame data model. I didn't want to get NEW pictures OFF the SD card; I needed to get OLD pictures ON the card. "No problem", I thought to myself. "I'll just scan and save the photos, put a fresh card in the camera, plug it in to my PC, and copy the old photos to the card using the camera itself as card reader/writer".

Note to self: In the future, you've got to remember to TEST these bright ideas before you spend five hours scanning and cropping old pics, only to discover that your Canon camera is a proprietary device. It turns out that the software engineers over at Canon have decided to imbed tags in the header of any image created with a Canon PowerShot A560. If you download that image and edit it with any software other than Canon's, you're not going to be able to write that image back to the card. Ditto for any image that was created or edited with a non-Canon camera to begin with.

Now I'm going to have to go to Staples and spend 20 bucks on an SD card reader that I'll probably never use again. I'm guessing that there are several thousand Canon camera owners that had exactly the same idea as me and are finding themselves in a similar predicament. Nice job, Canon.

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