As I just finished fiddling around with a frame to send my father-in-law, I'm here to report some gotchas and other handy tips for the digital photo frame owner -- either yourself or a gift recipient. I preloaded my frame with some photos, so I'll pass along those tips as well. And who knows -- after reading these, you might want to consider returning the frame you bought for another (possibly cheaper) model.

1.) Don't bother buying a frame because it has a certain amount of internal memory. Mid-range digital picture frames often come with 128 or 256 megabytes of internal memory. Frankly, I think it's wasted money.

Almost all frames accept a separate flash card, including cheap SD cards, which you can just leave in the frame. You may as well as invest in one; I picked up a 2-Gbyte flash card for about $35, and the prices keep coming down. The only reason I can see for buying a frame with internal memory is if you're afraid the card might get stolen, or that a prankster might add a photo of his posterior to the mix. Remember, you can store hundreds of photos per gigabyte, depending on their resolution.

Most PCs also have digital flash card readers. If yours doesn't, most electronics retailers will have a couple cheap USB readers. After purchasing one, take the flash card out of the camera, load it in the USB reader, copy the images onto your PC (if you wish) and then remove the lousy shots. Then copy the images down to the flash card again. You can buy 10-in-1 or even 15-in-1 card readers, but you'll really only need a card reader that accepts the card format your camera uses.

The bottom line: if you bought a frame with internal memory, see if there's an option for a similar model without the memory, and what the discount might be. You might save yourself a few bucks.

2.) When shooting photos, remember that they all need to be shot in the same orientation. Remember, you can rotate a physical photo, but you can't really rotate the digital picture frame itself; not for every shot, anyway. Yes, most frames come with an option to rotate the photo, but that doesn't really do the trick. If you're in London shooting Big Ben, try to shoot a horizontal "landscape" shot as well as a vertical "portrait" shot. Then you'll be covered either way.

On the photo frame itself, what normally happens is that the vertical shots are framed with large black bars to the left and right (when viewed horizontally). That doesn't look too bad, actually, but perfectionists might want to make sure their shots are oriented correctly.

3.) One of the most annoying gotchas is that most digital cameras shoot in 4:3 mode, with PC-friendly resolutions like 640x480 on up. However, most digital picture frames, for some odd reason, are essentially 16:9 widescreen LCDs. In reality, what this means is that a 4:3 photo will either be zoomed in slightly to fill the frame (cropping part of the image near the edges) or there will again be some black bars on the edge.

Simply resizing a 4:3 image to a 16:9 format (through a program like Irfanview, for example) stretches it awkwardly, and the resulting image looks bad. Most newer digital cameras support widescreen pictures; either shoot in that format, or use the Microsoft Office 2002 Photo Editor, a nifty little tool that has been disabled in subsequent versions. (In Photo Editor, you can crop to something like a 3x5 format, which is pretty close to 16:9 resolution.)

You can buy digital photo frames in a 4:3 aspect ratio, although they're somewhat rare. If this is important to you, consider the eStarling picture frames or something similar.

4.) Don't expect the photos to look like magazines. Most cheaper digital picture frames have resolutions of 480 x 234. Keep in mind that the resolutions of these frames don't necessarily scale; a smaller 5-inch 480x234 frame may actually produce better-looking images than a larger 7- or 8-inch frame with the same resolution, because the pixels will be spread over a wider area. Will this be important to the owner of the frame? Possibly, so choose accordingly.

In my admittedly non-scientific tests, I didn't see any improvement in image quality when I resized my photos to the native screen resolution of the digital picture frame display. You might want to fiddle, but I think you'll find that -- at least with the more inexpensive models -- that your pictures will look just fine.

5.) Finally, knowing the limitations of the picture frame, choose your photos accordingly. Closeups of people's faces work well, which is why the frames are so popular with grandparents and office workers. Colors reproduce pretty well too, so a beautiful Hawaiian sunset should look nice. Detail suffers, though, so a group shot of a class reunion (or a wedding) may serve as a visual reminder, rather than an accurate record.

6.) I suspect that a digital picture frame may suffer from LCD burn-in, so be careful. Personally, I think that the constantly transitioning pictures are going to be somewhat distracting, so users might be tempted to pause the digital frame on a single image. Beware, though -- you can "burn in" an image on an LCD if the image is shown constantly, without interruption, for hours. (If the LCD is scrolling through pictures, though, you have nothing to worry about.)