If you own a Memento 35" digital smart frame that has stopped working and will no longer permit the upload of new photos, I found a fix for this problem. Read on.
Around 2015 a Kickstarter campaign launched a unique product known as the Memento Smart Digital Frame. The product was simply magnificent for the exhibition of images taken with full-frame DSLRs because, unlike every other digital picture frame on the market, this one was 1) 4K resolution, which had not yet become widespread in LCD display screens at that time, and mainly 2) the LCD panel was sized to a 3:2 aspect ratio, exactly matching the shape of the image produced by a full-frame DSLR. This made it completely unlike all the other digital picture frames out there, which were based on 16:9 shaped LCD display panels used in TVs. If you try to display a DSLR full-frame image on a 16:9 screen, either the picture gets cropped, or you get ugly “filler bars” to fill in the unused screen on either side of the image. Unattractive. Display the same photo on the Memento frame, and it fills the screen, edge to edge, no cropping. And with 4K resolution, trust me, if it was a quality image, it looked like a million bucks on the Memento.
Although there are several large digital picture frames on the market today—like the Meural, by Netgear—as far as I can see, none of them are 3:2.
The problem with Memento was its kludgy software model— to get pictures into the Memento’s memory, you had to connect the frame to your local wifi network, and simultaneously run an app on your phone/tablet/PC. Via the app you would upload photos to a server maintained by the manufacturer of Memento, which would somehow process the image and then download it into the frame’s memory, where it would stay. The frame could store up to 3,000 images in its memory, but they all had to pass through the Memento server to get there. This was an inefficient, slow system if you had a lot of photos to install on the frame, but it worked.
It worked, that is, until it didn’t. One day, without much warning, Memento went out of business. Apparently some of their servers got switched off in the process, and a lot of Memento frame owners suddenly discovered that their frame could no longer receive new photo uploads, effectively crippling the product.
I was one of those owners who found themselves with a non-functioning frame. This was quite unwelcome after spending $900 on it.
I have spent months hunting down other Memento owners to see if anyone found a fix for this problem. Oddly enough I found a small number of photographers who owned Memento frames and claimed that their frames were still functioning normally. It appeared that everyone who claimed to having a still-functioning frame had one thing in common— their frame was running a newer firmware update (v. 6.02) than those of us whose frames stopped working (mine was v. 3.04). And so began my hunt for a place to download that newer firmware version.
After months of searching, I had about given up hope on finding the firmware (remember, the company went out of business— it’s website was erased) until this week when a good samaritan photographer from France saw one of my postings about this problem. He directed me to a Google Drive folder that someone at Memento set up before the company tanked where the firmware could be downloaded. Took all of 15 minutes to update my frame’s firmware and poof!..I now have a working Memento frame. I almost wept.
So in case there’s anyone on this forum who needs this—I’m posting a link below which takes you to the instructions on how to download and install the firmware fix on your Memento frame:
Please note, I think this firmware is for the 35" version of the Memento screen ONLY.
Speculation: even though the company that made this frame is gone, apparently there is still a server involved in running the Memento frame. When I boot up my frame, there’s a brief message stating the frame is synching its clock to the server. I have to wonder —what is the point of this server dependancy? And if this server will also get switched off some day— will that once again kill the product? It’s possible that this final firmware update may have reprogrammed the Memento so that pictures are going straight from the app into the frame, bypassing the server entirely. But I’m really not sure. For now I’m just hoping, after almost a year of looking for a solution, that my frame keeps working a long time. Good luck and stay healthy, everyone—