My parents-in-law live just over 115 miles away, a good 2.5 hour drive from our home. While it’s not exactly half way across the country, between work, school, and day to day life it can seem like it is. We get up there every chance we can, but when it comes to seeing their grand daughter it just is not enough. To stay connected between visits, we send A LOT of pictures and videos. Nothing brightens a grandparents day quite like the smile of their grandchild showing up unexpectedly on their phone or email. The only downside is that pictures rarely make it from digital form to picture frame. That is until the perfect daughter-in-law – if I do say so myself – found them the perfect grandparents day gift: The Ceiva Pro 80 Digital Frame.

The Ceiva takes the digital picture frame to the next level. It combines the beautiful display of a digital picture frame, online photo storage and the convience of mobile devices into one neat package so user friendly even the technically challenged can enjoy it. Our Ceiva picture frame came with a membership to Out My Window. Which is what really sets Ceiva apart from the rest.

Out My Window is an all new way to share and save pictures. It gave me complete control of my photos, including who views them. Unlike social media sites Out My Window lets me invite who exclusively can see my photos. Even with the best privacy settings on other social media sites it is possible for my families picture to fall into strangers screens – that’s not exactly a comforting thought!

However, Out My Window is so much more than secure photo storage and sharing. One of the first things I did was download the Out My Window app for my iPhone, shocker right? With that one little app I opened a wealth of sharing, much to my parents delight. 

After some quick and painless account set up I had created an account. The fun part was uploading pictures. One of the things so wonderful about Out My Window is that I can access it from virtually anywhere in real time. If I need pictures from my phone I used the app. When I was transferring pictures from my computer and photo sharing sites I used their webservice. It was great that I didn’t have to juggle a thousand pictures to one device in order to upload them.

After my photos were uploaded I was ready to start sharing with family. I was able to invite all of my family members to view my albums or select family members to view select albums for more specific photo sharing. Most importantly I was able to link to the Ceiva Pro 80.

I created an entire album dedicated to the apple of our family’s eye. There I could add descriptions to pictures, and send them to my parent’s Ceiva frame right from my phone – no SD Cards or hoops to jump through. My family could also leave comments and likes or tag themselves in pictures. Maddilyn’s papa started “liking” pictures right away.

In addition to being able to share to our hearts content Out My Window sorted my pictures into an easy to see timeline. I love that I don’t have to organize everything into folders. I don’t know about you but I have a hundred folders sorting my pictures by time periods, special trips or occasions. With the timeline it’s all done for me and if I want to make note that something was a trip or special occasion I can just tag it!

The features and ease of the Ceiva Pro are amazing but what we love most is Maddilyn’s Nano and Papa brighten each time a photo appears on the frame. They don’t even have to do anything, the photo frame automatically connect every hour. A digital frame may not be able to close the 115 mile distance between our homes but  it makes the time apart easier. Not quite as important, it won me some major brownie points!

Thank you to Ceiva for providing product for purposes of this review during an OutMyWindow press event. All opinions all original and no additional compensation was received.