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All You Ever Wanted To Know About Picture Frames

By: Chris Channing The picture frame has many different uses all working towards to same goal, displaying a picture. One use is to hang a picture to a wall; another is to enhance the picture itself visually. Wood and metal have been most notoriously used over the years but more extravagant frames have been made from all sorts of things including sea shells. Electronic and digital picture frames have most recently been used to enhance picture frames.

Picture frames original use was to support and protect paintings that they wished to hang on walls. Instead of puncturing the work of art with a nail or screw, the painting could be preserved by putting four wooden borders around it and nailing that to the wall.

The picture frame can be used to protect the painting. A sheet of glass was placed between the frame's sides and over the painting. Today Plexiglas has replaced glass for most picture frames. This would prevent insects from landing and harming the painting. It also prevented dust from landing on the paintings and damaging them. Lastly the glass was used to prevent people from touching and or harming the fragile works of art.

The picture frame does more than just safe guard the picture it protects; it also enhances the picture visually, by adding to its beauty. In some cases the frame itself can be considered a work of art. Woodcarvings are put into picture frames by artists who like to express themselves in that fashion. Metal workers can do likewise by molding designs in to the surface of metal frames, thus adding to the beauty of the painting.

Today not all pictures are used to house beautiful works of art. They are used with our family portraits, baby pictures, and baseball team photographs. At first the picture frames that were used to hold these types of pictures could only be plain wood or metal. The average person would not want to buy a hand crafted frame for a picture that they would merely hang on their wall.

Modern technology has greatly changed household picture frames. Electronic picture frames allow people to insert light bulbs into the picture frame. This could add just a little more Christmas cheer to our holiday pictures, with red and green lights surrounding it.

The newest advancement in the picture frame industry is the use of digital picture frames. With these picture frames you do not even physically require a picture to be held within it. These picture frames take a digital picture taken from a person's personal digital camera and display it on the screen held inside the frame. Some of these frames can display pictures as a slideshow. This means that they can take several pictures and slowly rotate through which ones are shown on the screen at a particular time.

Some say that these factors make the basic picture frame inferior to the digital camera because it can do the work of dozens of picture frames by itself. MP3 audio files can also be uploaded to the digital picture frame allowing a person to enjoy a song while they enjoy the pictures. Others say that the traditional picture frames are not comparable to the digital because you are not truly able to see the picture, just its image displayed on a screen. These things are for the consumer to decide on their own accord. Which one best meets their needs and their preferences.