When my first digital picture frame refused to show several images that I put onto its memory card, I assumed that the images were corrupted or that their dimensions were incompatible. After trying to resize, resample and change color depth, I decided that there was some other random bug that would not let my seemingly random set of photos display. But after purchasing a second digital photo frame from a different manufacturer, I found that the exact same set of images would not display.

In one frame, villainous files simply echoed "Out of Memory” when the slideshow attempted to display those images. In the newer frame, the images would throw the whole slideshow off and say "Invalid File".

So I determined to get to the bottom of the problem. My first clue came when I asked Windows Explorer to display extra details about the files in the Explorer Window. Immediately, I noticed that all files that were failing were missing the "Date Picture Taken” attribute. It dawned on me that the images were scanned images from before I had a digital camera.

After calling my friend Andrew Penry to see if he knew of any way to add EXIF data to JPEGs, Andrew recommended converting the images to BMP (Windows Bitmaps) since they have no EXIF data at all. Upon converting the images to BMP, everything worked fine.

So if your digital picture frame fails to display images, try converting them to Bitmaps. Of course, this will only work if your digital frame also supports the BMP file format. Also, while most BMP files did work, some that were larger than 6MB still failed to work.