Aura, a digital photo frames company founded by early Twitter employees, is introducing its latest model, Aspen, which adds new technology to the device and its accompanying mobile app. In addition to hosting your digital photos in its 12-inch HD display, the device now also allows you to add captions to your photos when they appear on the frame. Meanwhile, the mobile app added a people search feature that makes it easier to find the photos you want to display.

Aura was founded by former Twitter employees Abdur Chowdhury and Eric Jensen, and its vision has been to offer more elegant and upgraded digital frames for displaying people’s digital photos in their home, combined with a well-designed software platform for managing the frames’ content.

Ahead of the Aspen’s launch, Aura offered other frames in different sizes and styles, like the
Carver and the wall-mounted Walden. Its mobile app has over 6 million users, giving you a sense of the scale of its user base.

The company today attracts customers who want to enjoy their digital photos in their homes and share them with friends and family through a private social network where members can contribute their photos to your frames. This may appeal to those who are looking for ways to connect with people close to them outside of traditional social media, while also looping in older family members by allowing younger, more tech-savvy people to manage their elders’ frames on their behalf.

Last year, Aura says customers shared 784 million photos to their frames, an increase of 55% year-over-year. In addition, the private social networks built by sharing photos among families, friends, and other invited members helped to drive 50% of Aura’s annual sales in 2024.

On any given day, Aura frames display a cumulative 5 billion photos and videos, the company also noted.

Its newest addition, the $229 Aspen frame, is now the company’s thinnest at 0.5 inch on the edge. Its 1,600×1,200 HD anti-glare display and 4:3 aspect ratio also help to showcase people’s mobile phone photos in the best light, calibrated for brightness, contrast, and color.

However, one of the other big draws for Aura’s devices is that its software for frame management isn’t an afterthought.

The accompanying Aura photo-sharing app walks users through getting connected to their home’s Wi-Fi network and quickly adding photos to their frames, in only a few steps. The app itself is as well-built as any social app you may already use, our tests found, providing access to your various frames within its left-side navigation alongside a two-tabbed interface on the app’s main page for adding new photos and managing the existing photos on your devices.

Typically, when you add photos to an Aura frame, you would browse your Camera Roll or other photo albums to find your favorites and select them. But the app’s new People Search feature now lets you simply tap on a photo of a person whose photos you want to prioritize. These suggested people are now found in a row at the top of the “add photos” screen. (Unfortunately, if you’ve made AI photos of yourself when playing around with other photo apps, those aren’t excluded — you’ll need to do so manually.)

This new search feature runs locally on users’ devices to protect their privacy, Aura notes.

In addition, users can now add more context to their photos by entering in captions that could contain information like the date, location, or other personal notes, which then appear on the frame itself.

The Aspen frame comes in two colors, Ink or Clay, and includes a metal stand, paper-textured matting, decorative trim, and a fabric-wrapped cord that gives the device more of an upscale feel. Like other Aura frames, it includes other technical features, like an ambient light sensor that turns your frame off at night when your room darkens, and a hidden touch bar on top of the frame that lets you scroll through your photos and adjust your settings without leaving fingerprints on the frame’s display.

The company, which is backed by $60 million in growth capital from LAGO Innovation Fund, was profitable in 2024 and is still growing.