Relief for Mac-based Ceiva Customers

I've been a Ceiva digital photo frame user for several years now, and consider it a useful part of my extended digital home. I own two of their original units, one for my place and one that resides at my in-law's home in Florida. LCD frames that display digital images are very common now, but the models you see in your local department store almost certainly require locally-stored images. That is, you insert a memory card that is pre-loaded with images and that's what the frame displays, in slideshow fashion.

The Ceiva is different, it has a built-in modem (yes, a dial-up modem!) and during the middle of the night it calls the company's servers and downloads 20 or so pictures from your account. Every day you get a fresh batch of pictures, and you never have to have physical access to the frame. That's why it has been successful for my family. I bought a Ceiva frame in California, hooked it up just long enough to register it and program it for dialing local Florida-based access points, then shipped it to my in-laws in Melbourne Beach. They plugged it into the wall and connected it to the phone line, and it has been running error-free for several years now. In fact, I don't think they've ever noticed it using their phone line, and probably attribute the new pictures it displays to some sort of computerized magic. And in a sense, they're right. I plan on keeping their Ceiva in service indefinitely; the high subscription fee ($100 a year) is worth it as a way to share photos across the miles.

A friend of mine tried a similar arrangement, but it didn't work out for him because he thought the Ceiva interface—the one you use to upload pictures to the centralized server—was too much hassle. He's right, it uses an archaic web-based upload process, and I too refuse to use it. Instead, I use their email-based interface. Sure, I can only send 10 pictures at a time this way, but that hasn't been a problem for me, and Mail's built-in "size" pop-up menu lets me scale the images down to the lower resolution (640 x 480) with which Ceiva works best.

This week, however, after years of virtually ignoring Mac-based Ceiva customers, the company has released a beta version of an iPhoto plug-in. The new plug-in lets you use iPhoto's "export" feature to send photos directly to the Ceiva server. It's not very sophisticated as most plug-ins go, and I found it to be terribly finicky about my Ceiva password and account, but it's frankly such a surprise that it's hard to complain too much.

Before you think that I'm over-the-top happy with Ceiva, and interpret this as an unqualified endorsement, I should add that in the last year I've stopped using the Ceiva frame that I had for my house. The local dial-in access number stopped working reliably and I was unable to get satisfactory resolution from their tech support. (Details on my personal blog.) But if you're already a Ceiva customer, check out the plug-in, and in the future I'll write about the Mac-based solution I'm now using at home instead.