Do yourself a favor: buy a digital frame

It will make distance seem a tiny bit smaller.

When I was at my early twenties, I used to have a digital frame. It was a gift from my girlfriend at the time. And it was cute. She took the time to fill it with nice photos of us and gave it to me for my birthday. Plug and play. She also asked me to update the photos every time we took new ones. And that is when things went south.

Photo by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash

You see, 10+ years ago, digital frames came with an SD card. To load photos to the frame, you needed to:

1. Connect the digital camera to your computer.

2. Copy-paste the photos you took to the computer.

3. Connect the frame's SD card to the computer (you needed a card reader for that).

4. Copy-paste the photos from the computer to the SD card.

5. Safely eject¹ the camera and the card reader from the computer. By the way, there is no more bad-ass feeling than straight up pulling a usb out.

6. Re-insert the SD card to the frame and turn it on.

The gift was very nice, but I was not the right person to do all these things. So eventually, I got bored of the frame, because I would never update the photos. Even when we were still together, some of the photos were pretty old. When we broke up, they were... obsolete 😅.

Today's post is about a product. More specifically, about promoting a type of product. Below is a short FAQ²:

Q: A product??
A: Yes, a product.

Q: You know your substack is about expats right?
A: Thanks for the reminder.

Q: What kind of product?
A: A digital frame.

Q: A digital frame? Like the one you were not using?
A: Yes.

Q: Is the post sponsored?
A: Haha. No.

Q: Are you using affeliate links?
A: Nope.

Q: So in a newsletter talking about expat life, you wrote a post promoting a product? That you were not using yourself?
A: Exactly.

Well, almost. But I 'll get to that.

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Fast forward 10+ years, what do I receive as a Christmas present?
Slippers.

Photo by Philippe Jausions on Unsplash

I 'm joking. I received slippers the year after. That Christmas, I received a digital frame. It was a gift from my girlfriend's parents. Not my girlfriend from 10 years ago. My current girlfriend's parents. I know this takes a bit long, but please bare with me.

The concept of the frame was exactly the same: load pictures. Have them pass by in front of you as a slideshow. Only this frame had a very important, additional feature: it came with an app you could use to upload photos directly from your phone.

Amazing right? All the hassle of plugging and (safely) unplugging³ SD cards gone and only the fun part left.

Ok fair enough. But what about expats? I subscribed to read about expat life stories and so far I ‘ve wasted 843 words⁴ reading about a frame.

Patience young Padawan.

One of the main issues I face being an expat, is losing moments from my friends and family, due to distance.

Similarly, my friends and family are losing moments from me. But if I can somehow share some of my moments with them, then this problem becomes a tiny bit smaller. And if they can share some of their moments with me, then I also feel I am closer to them. I am part of their life.

When I first received the frame, I was a couple of months away moving to the US⁵. That meant that, I needed to empty my room, for someone else to take it over during that time. It also meant that I had to cram my most important belongings into two suitcases. The rest would go into boxes that would stay stored away, until I was back. Some would even go back to Greece.

I decided that the digital frame could not fit in the luggage. But it was also a pity not to make use of it to share photos from the US. So I decided to lend it to my mom.

Aaaaanyway, this experiment was a huge success. My mom loved it and I could send her random photos I was taking. She also uploaded a few old ones, and suddenly she had a complete slideshow of travels to look at, while siping her morning coffee. The success of the experiment also affected the duration of the loan. In other words, she confiscated the frame and once I was back, I had to buy a new one. Now, whenever I take a nice photo, I send it to the frame. This makes her also feel part of my life in Denmark.

One of my best friends and his girlfriend -now wife- recently became parents to the cutest little girl, let's call her Maria⁶. The family lives in London, which means that unfortunately I cannot spend as much time I would have liked with them. On top of that, my concern, as I phrased it to my friend, is that:

It is not possible that your daughter grows up without knowing the ugly faces of your best friends.

So I bought them a digital frame.

Now little Maria can see my -admittedly adorable- face everyday while growing up. Not only that, but she will be getting fresh photos from me (and of me) quite regularly :).
As expected, I have also loaded my own frame with pictures of her. This way I feel her being part of my routine, seeing her antics passing by in front me, while working.

If you are an expat, and you feel like you are missing out on moments with friends and family, do yourself a favor and buy a digital frame. Then share the link with your loved ones and let them send you their photos at will. Even better, buy one for them too and do the same.

I guarantee you will catch yourself smiling at photos, while no one is around.

PS: If you are gonna contact me asking which product I am talking about, let me know a few days in advance, so I sign up for Amazon's affiliate program :P.

1. If you don’t know what safe eject means, then I can guess your age group.

2. Frequently Asked Questions.

3. Safety first people, safety first.

4. I know, I ‘ve checked.

5. Eventually, I will write about that too.

6. They are both Greek, so I thought it was appropriate that the baby’s made-up name is also Greek.