Amazing Frame Show

A common representation of an office desk is equipped with a computer, a bunch of papers and writing utensils, a beverage cup, and one or two photo frames of loved ones. However, with modern day focusing on rush, and work on the move on mobile devices, it's pretty difficult to have the family picture constantly in your sight. Amazing Frame Show wants to help you out in this regard, giving you the possibility to keep such a frame directly on your desktop.

After a little while spent hitting a few “next” buttons to get the application deployed, you're free to try out its features. Once launched, a default frame pops on your desktop, with no regular window elements, menus or buttons. No picture is displayed, instead you're told how to make one appear inside the frame.

The application doesn't completely lack controls, but they're hidden in a context menu, which is also the way through which you load photos. File support is decent, with the possibility to load formats like JPG, BMP, GIF, and PNG, but you need to use the open dialog, because drag and drop is not supported. GIF animations are not rendered, so you're limited to static images.

It's a classic case of what you see is what you get, with literally nothing more at your disposal than one of the few available frames and the picture you decide to load. Up to six different frames are up for selection, but this has a major impact on flexibility, not because of the small amount, rather that they are actually three different category pairs, such as heart, creative, and classic.

There are no effects to apply or adjustments to make to the frame itself. Although these are represented by high-quality textures, most take up much more space than the picture itself, and can't even be adjusted in size. Transparency level can be adjusted, with the resulting effect being applied to the picture as well.

By default, the image you load is in the original size, so you need to spend some time calibrating it. This is done by moving it inside the frame and through dedicated controls to zoom in and out. Sadly, you can only load one picture, with no option to have it automatically changed at a regular time interval.

All things considered, we can state that Amazing Frame Show is just a fancy name for a second image you can keep on your desktop besides the background image. Intentions are good, but the lack of diversity in its set of features makes practicality highly questionable. Even Windows is able to change your background automatically, while displaying images in an even bigger frame.