The frame is great, the software and storage sucks!! I bought the SD card loaded thousands of images but the software won't turn the frame back on in the morning to the SD card. If you want to add pictures you need to take the frame off the wall take out the SD card, load the pictures, put the sd card back in and re-hang the Meural. I wound up paying for the cloud storage. Loading pictures and controlling through their cloud works fine. But I shouldn't have to pay extra to do that.
I have copied images to an SD card and then inserted the SD card into the card reader on the Meural. The device displays the images from the SD card. I dont use the netgear cloud as I found the interface very difficult and slow. I have never viewed any of the netgear provided images, only my own, from my SD card.
The trick I found to work was to remove ALL images from the cloud. I had uploaded a few images to the cloud, but when I saw the terrible interface to interact with it, I decided to go the SD route. And then, I started having a lot of the issues that you guys mention.
I ended up removing all the images that I had previously uploaded to the cloud and now the frame is happily displaying only the images in the SD card.
I still have issues with pictures not displaying properly - because their aspect ratio doesn't sit well with the frame. However, I recently bought a Nest Hub Max, and even though the display is much smaller and the quality not even close - at least the software works beautifully and it can display all types of images, landscape, portrait, from old cameras, from new phones. So, IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO IT. Netgear should get a dedicated team to fix this once and for all. It's 2021!
Great reply and very helpful. Thanks for the time to reply. This is what I looked for. Hopefully Netgear will listen to its frustrated customers and do something for the money they have spent in the area of support and App improvements
I found the cloud server clumsy in both upload & download and gave poor control. For me the SD card is the only way to go. The SD card has no storage limit and plays pictures in numerical file order. To get a numerical file ‘play’ you need to use a number sequence of the same order so if you have 99 images you need to start & label image no.1 as “100” up to “199” (3 digits) if you have 9,999 images you need to use the sequence starting at “1,000” up to “9,999” (4 digits) and so on …..
Don’t need to remove frame from the wall. Power down the frame then unplug it from power, (this seems to make it recognize the new contents on the SD card better). Anyway, just open the SD card slot and remove the card. When ready re-install card, plug the Canvas back into the outlet and power it up. Again, no need to remove from the wall.
