Digital Photo Frame

You will probably need to increase the size of the images in an image editor in order to fill the screen.

Do the instructions state a max picture size and, if so do your pictures match it?

 

Yes - that is the size of image in pixels which will fill the frame. 640 x 480 is also the image ratio of a standard (not wide screen) monitor.

If your images are 640 x 480 they will fill the screen, but the odds are that they are not in the 4:3 ratio, especially if they originate from a digital camera.

You can check the size of the jpegs by mousing over them in Windows Explorer where the tooltip will show the physical dimemsions in pixels or right click on any of the column headers in the right pane of Windows Explorer > click on More at the bottom of the drop down list and scroll down the Choose Details window and check Dimensions. A Dimensions column will be added to the Explorer view for that folder.

You can make a physical check using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer - right click on jpeg > Preview. Use the magnify button to increase the size of the image on the screen and you will see where it will not completely fit the 4:3 ratio.

Ideally you need to crop the image to a 4:3 ratio, 640 x 480 pixels at 72 ppi - standard Windows screen resolution.

If you don't have an image editor you may find IrfanView useful.

 

The frame spec of 640 x 480 (4:3) is not widescreen (16:9) so the spec data is misleading.

I think the best way of explaining this is as follows .....

If you view a wide screen movie on a 4:3 ratio TV (the standard size before widescreen) or on a standard - non-widescreen computer monitor the picture is letterboxed and there is a black band top and bottom.The monitor is showing the full width of the picture and the depth at 16:9 ratio is not enough to fill the screen.

In your case the full depth of the picture is being shown, but the width of the picture is not large enough to spread across the screen - hence a black band at each end.

The only solution is to crop the pictures to a 16:9 format which means losing some of the picture at the top or bottom or both. If you resize the picture to a 16:9 format it will be stretched - distorted.

I cannot help you with the very popular Irfanview as I am a Photoshop user, but I am sure that the manual covers image cropping and resizing.