Digital picture frame company Aura’s newest product, the Aspen, displays your digital photos in analog style. With a 12-inch antiglare display, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and a super slim bezel, the $229 frame improves on the company’s 10-inch Carver frame ($149) while retaining Aura’s core photo-sharing feature. It also brings two new features to the table: text captions and people search.

The Aspen is designed to sit on a desk or shelf and comes with an adjustable stand that works in horizontal or portrait mode. It features a paper-textured matte, a 1600 x 1200 resolution HD LCD display, and a bezel that’s just 0.5 inches thick. It shares several features with the company’s wall-mountable 15-inch Walden ($299) — both have high-resolution, antiglare displays and a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the Walden is larger and thicker than the Aspen.

Aura sent me an Aspen ahead of the launch this week, and I’ve had a few days to play with it. The first thing that struck me was how much more it looks like a traditional photo frame than the Carver. Its slim design and lightweight build are a nice change from the chunkier style of the earlier model. Its new antiglare screen better mimics a real photo, and the 4:3 aspect ratio displays the images beautifully.

That 4:3 format is key. As the default setting for most smartphone cameras, nearly all the photos coming out of your phone will fit that size. This means they’ll display on the frame without black bars, weird blurring effects, or awkward side-by-side showcasing. Instead, the frame shows portrait and horizontal photos in full screen, with some cropping that can be adjusted in the Aura app.

You add photos to the frame from your camera roll through the Aura Frames app (available on iOS and Android). You can also email them to the device or have them automatically added with an iCloud Photos or Google Photos album integration. (The latter is still available despite Google initially saying it was shutting it down.)

Aura CTO Eric Jensen tells me that sourcing LCD displays for this size and use case was tricky, but something the company worked toward for a while. “It’s the best middle-ground size and thinness,” he says of the Aspen, adding that they designed this frame specifically to sit on a desk. “I’m excited that we were able to source a display that is the right aspect ratio, and right size, and at the right price point.”

Jensen says Aura has done a lot of work to make its digital frames look like photo frames and not just gussied-up screens — to be “invisible” technology. Each display is individually calibrated at the factory to “match the native lighting environment,” he says.

A built-in ambient light sensor dims the frame in darker environments, turning it off completely when the lights go out. The new adjustable metal stand on the Aspen resembles what you’d find on a regular photo frame, and a touch bar lets you swipe between images without leaving fingerprints on the screen.

But a screen is still a screen, and when the Aspen is next to actual photo frames, you can pick out the intruder. Still, as dedicated digital photo frames go, it has a lot of style and doesn’t look like a piece of tech. There’s also a lot of value in seeing multiple photos in one frame, which feels worth the tradeoff of another screen in your home (and this one doesn’t show ads or spoil your images with widgets like some smart displays).

The Aspen is especially delightful when it displays Live photos from your iPhone as mini-movies — it feels very Harry Potter-esque. It can also show videos up to 30 seconds long, and with sound if you tap the touch bar.

The new text captions and people search features, which are coming to all Aura frames, add some useful functions. You can now filter your camera roll by specific people, making adding photos of loved ones easier. The text captions, which you can add in the app and appear on the frame, are a nice way to add context when you’re sharing new photos to a family member’s frame. This also helps with Aura’s other use case — as the orchestrator of a private family social network.

Sharing photos across different frames is core to the Aura experience. According to Jensen, many people’s first experience with Aura is buying one for a family member and sending pictures to the frame from the app. Jensen tells me each Aura frame has, on average, four people connected to it to add photos, creating a network effect.

This network effect was the original idea behind Aura. Jensen and his cofounder, Abdur Chowdhury, started the company after leaving Twitter in 2012. They had sold their search startup, Summize, to the then-nascent social network in 2008.

The duo was still interested in social networks, but of the smaller kind. However, many early ideas ran up against a common problem for this type of business: revenue streams. Then, they had an idea to combine a photo-sharing network with good hardware to display the images, and Aura was born.

Even they were surprised at how quickly this took hold, Jensen says; with people sharing photos and sharing frames, Aura soon turned into a viable business. The fun of sharing photos with loved ones in a way that is not restricted to their phone or computer and is physically present inside their homes is, apparently, catching.

Unlike some competitors, Aura doesn’t charge a subscription fee for its cloud-based photo storage. Its business model is based on people buying one frame, and then inevitably buying more. “Today, we know when we sell a frame to you that you buy for your mom, that you are going to buy a certain number of frames in the future. That accounts for more than half our sales,” Jensen says. “That network growth is what drives the business.”

It’s certainly refreshing to have a simple, private way to share photos with family, other than emailing them or posting them on social media (something my teenage kids refuse to let me do). I gave my mom an Aura frame to test the sharing feature, and while I knew she would love seeing new pictures of the family, I was surprised at how she reacted. Rather than just commenting on a social media post or replying to an email, she called to talk about the photos I’d shared to her frame. That felt a lot more social.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge