Frame Crop - Samsung Frame TV

Review by eFreeware

A Frame TV spends most of its life pretending to be a picture frame, and the illusion breaks the moment the art on screen is the wrong shape. Standard photos arrive with the wrong aspect ratio, and a borderless display has no bezel to hide the mismatch. Getting a personal photo or a downloaded painting to fill that panel properly usually means fiddling with an image editor and guessing at dimensions.

Frame Crop, from developer Shane Jeffers, exists to close that gap. It is a paid Android app in the Photography category that crops photos and artwork to fit the screens of Samsung Frame TV and Hisense CanvasTV, and it also pulls in ready-made art from several public collections. The $7.99 price is the whole cost.

The app has been on Google Play since July 2023 and currently sits at a 4.7 average from 241 ratings, with more than 1,000 installs. Those numbers describe a small, specific audience rather than a mass-market tool, which fits what the app is built to do.

What the cropping tools actually do

The core of the app is a cropping tool aimed at one job: making an image fit a borderless screen without awkward bars or stretched proportions. You bring in a photo, adjust the crop, and the result is sized for the Frame's display rather than for a phone or a computer monitor. The developer describes the tools as intuitive, and the appeal of a single-purpose app like this is that the fiddly math of aspect ratios is handled for you.

The app also supports portrait-mounted Frame TVs. That matters more than it sounds, because a Frame hung vertically needs art composed the other way around, and most image tools assume a landscape orientation. Being able to prepare a portrait crop means the app covers both ways people actually hang the television.

Once an image is prepared, it is ready to display. Frame Crop is therefore a preparation tool: it gets the file right.

Art libraries built into the app

Beyond your own photos, Frame Crop includes integrated libraries so you can browse and download art without leaving the app. The collections named are Smithsonian Open Access, Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons, which between them cover paintings, photography, landscapes, animals and more. For anyone who wants to change the picture on the wall with the seasons, that is a lot of material in one place.

The value here is convenience as much as choice. Public-domain and open-license collections are freely available elsewhere, but collecting them yourself means downloading files, checking resolution and cropping each one to fit. Having the libraries inside the app means the browsing and the fitting happen in the same place.

The developer's summary describes millions of pieces of art across these sources. I would treat that as a description of the underlying collections rather than a promise about what you will find in any single browsing session, since the catalogs are large and the app surfaces them through search and browsing.

Collages arrived in the latest update

The most substantial recent addition is collages. Instead of one image filling the screen, you can place several pieces of art on the Frame at once. Pick a layout, then fine-tune the spacing, the mat and each crop after choosing photos from a collection or your own library.

The collage can be downloaded or sent to the television, and it can be saved to your collections so you can come back and edit it later. That last part matters for anyone who likes to tinker: a layout you build once is not a one-off, and you can refine it over time rather than starting from scratch.

That same release also improved how the app handles browsing big collections, refined the iPad layouts, and repaired sign-in, downloads and TV actions. The iPad improvements suggest the app is used on tablets as well as phones, which makes sense for a tool where you are judging an image by eye.

What the app asks of you

The first requirement is hardware. It targets Frame TVs from Samsung and CanvasTV sets from Hisense. That is not a limitation so much as the entire point, but it does mean the audience is defined by what is hanging on the wall.

The second requirement is the television itself. Frame Crop handles the file; SmartThings handles the transfer.

On cost, the picture is simple. The app is $7.99. The app includes art libraries and collages. The decision comes before the download rather than after it.

Getting the most from it

The most natural way to use Frame Crop is to decide what mood or decor you want on the wall, then work backward. If you are matching a room, the integrated libraries are the quickest route: search for a style, download a piece, and adjust the crop to the screen. If you want something personal, your own photos from a trip or a family gathering are the raw material, and the cropping tools are what make them presentable on a borderless panel.

Collages suit a different impulse. A single large image makes a statement; a grid of several smaller ones reads more like a gallery wall, and the ability to tune spacing and the mat gives you control over how formal it looks. Saving a collage to your collections means you can build a small set of layouts and rotate between them.

Because the app supports portrait mounting, it is worth deciding early how the television is hung. Preparing a batch of art in the right orientation saves redoing the work later. It helps to think of Frame Crop as the preparation step rather than a standalone player.

A focused tool for Frame owners

The combination of cropping tools, portrait support and integrated art libraries covers the whole routine of choosing, fitting and displaying a picture.

The $7.99 price keeps the arrangement clean, and the 4.7 rating from 241 ratings suggests the people who bought it have been satisfied. The collage feature added in the latest update extends what you can do with a single screen, and the ability to save layouts for later editing gives it some staying power.

If you own one of these televisions and change the art on it more than occasionally, the app is a reasonable purchase. If you do not own one, there is nothing here for you, and that is fine: it was never meant for anyone else.

What's new in version 12.0.63

NEW: Collages Put several pieces of art on your Frame at once. Choose photos from any collection or your own library, pick a layout, and adjust each crop, the spacing, and the mat. Download it or send it to your TV, and save it to your collections to edit later. Also in this update • Smoother scrolling through large collections • Better layouts on iPad • Fixes for signing in, downloads, and TV actions