Your frame:

Image Tips

Wallie isn’t a screen — it’s closer to a print on the wall that updates. The same photos that look beautiful on paper look beautiful on Wallie. The same photos that don’t translate well to paper don’t translate well here either.

A short guide to picking the photos that sing on the wall.

What to expect from e-ink

E-ink is its own category — not a phone screen, not a TV, not a paper print. Five things to know before you put one on the wall.

	Phone or TV	Wallie
Light	Shines at you	Reflects whatever’s in the room
Direct sun	Washes out	Looks great
At night	Still glowing	Dark, like any framed photo
Changing the image	Instant	About 30 seconds, with visible color cycling
Display power when idle	Constant	None

The display reflects light. It does not make light. A phone or TV is a small lamp pointed at your face. Wallie sits on the wall and shows you whatever light is in the room. There’s no glare and no glow at night. Direct sun is welcome — it is how a photograph on paper is meant to be seen.

Room lighting makes a difference. Wallie looks its best with some ambient light — natural light from a window, overhead fixtures, shelf lighting, or a sconce nearby all bring it to life. In a very dark room with no light source, it’ll look dim, the same as any framed photo would.

Changing a photo takes about 30 seconds and looks unusual the first time. The display cycles through black, white, yellow, red, blue, and green — the six inks in the display — while it lays down the new image. This is how every color e-ink display works. Most people watch one or two refreshes out of curiosity and then stop noticing.

The dithering dissolves with distance. Wallie uses E Ink’s latest-generation Spectra 6 panel — the current high-water mark for full-color e-paper at this size — at roughly 150 pixels per inch on the 13″ and 200 pixels per inch on the 10″ (both panels carry the same pixel count, so the smaller frame packs them tighter). To make every shade beyond its six inks, the panel mixes them in tiny dots — the same trick printed photography has used for a century, called dithering.

Within a foot: the dot pattern is visible as fine, painterly grain.
At arm’s length: the grain begins to merge.
A foot or two further back: it dissolves into smooth, continuous color.

Up close, this can read as pixellation. It isn’t — those are the dithering dots, purpose-built for this exact panel. Like the pixels on a television, you only notice them up close; from a natural viewing distance you never do. Wallie is built for the distance you’d view any framed photo: across a room, from a couch, from the kitchen island — just past arm’s length, the dots merge into smooth, continuous color.

The colors are softer than a phone screen. Closer to a photo on paper than a photo on a screen. Skin tones land slightly warmer and more sculpted. Deep blacks read as near-black with a faint cool undertone, the way real ink does on paper. The calmer palette takes a minute to register if you’ve spent years in front of glowing rectangles, and then it’s hard to go back.

Between refreshes, the panel uses no power. E-ink holds an image without electricity. Wallie only draws meaningful power during the 30-second swap and the brief moments it talks to Wi-Fi. That’s why a single charge runs for months — and why the frame never feels warm.

About the in-app preview. The Wallie app shows a simulation of how each photo will appear, tuned closely to match the real display. Your actual frame may look a little different — the light in your room affects how colors come through, and no two displays are exactly the same — but the preview is a reliable guide for picking photos that work.

What looks great

Rich contrast. Dramatic light, deep shadows, distinct subjects — these images come alive on Wallie. Moody portraits, golden-hour landscapes, dappled-light interiors all sing.
Photos full of something. Texture, content, atmosphere. A bowl of fruit, a busy street, a forest, a face — anything that fills the frame with visual interest.
Stories with depth. Photos with a foreground, middle, and background give Wallie’s color palette room to breathe.
Real moments. Imperfect, lived-in photos — kids mid-laugh, a messy kitchen counter, a snowy morning — translate beautifully.

What to watch out for

Big empty white spaces. A solid white sky, a blank wall behind a subject, an over-exposed background — these read as a flat patch on Wallie. The display has texture; flat white doesn’t.
Fluorescent / neon colors. The 6-color e-ink palette is generous but not unlimited. Hot pink will render as a softer pink. Neon yellow becomes a gentler gold. Most photos don’t have these colors at all; the ones that do will look slightly more painterly.

Heavily filtered or super-saturated edits aren’t a problem — they’ll just feel more natural on Wallie, like the same photo printed on paper. Many people end up preferring the calmer, more grown-up version.

Photo quality matters

Whatever’s in the original photo, Wallie shows. The dithering process tends to amplify whatever’s already there — including problems. A few things to look for before sending:

Sharpness. Soft focus, motion blur, and shaky-hand shots translate clearly to the wall. Pick photos that are crisp where it counts — the subject’s face, the texture in the foreground.
Exposure. Heavily over-exposed photos lose detail in the highlights and read as flat patches of white on the display. Heavily under-exposed photos lose detail in the shadows and read as dark blobs. Photos with detail across the full range translate best.
Resolution. Wallie’s display is 1600 × 1200 pixels — a true 4:3 frame, on both the 13″ and the 10″. Photos from any modern phone or camera vastly exceed this — you don’t need to think about it. The exception is small or heavily-compressed images: screenshots, photos saved from chat apps years ago, or images pulled off the web. Those can look soft on the wall. Send originals when you can.
Formats. JPEG, HEIC, and PNG all work. RAW files (DNG, ARW, NEF, CR2, and the like) and TIFFs are skipped when you add photos or Auto import runs — Wallie can’t show them, so they never leave your phone. Export a JPEG from your photo editor and add that instead.

Wallie’s palette

Wallie has six actual “inks.” Every other color you see — sunset oranges, skin tones, ocean blues — is made by mixing these six.

Black

A deep, near-black with a faintly cool undertone. Absorbs light like real ink rather than glowing like a screen.

White

A soft, neutral white — a touch dimmer than pure white, like a freshly printed page.

Yellow

A bright, sunny yellow — sunflower and school-bus yellow, not pale lemon.

Red

A rich, saturated red — closer to ripe tomato or holly berry than to a glowing neon red.

Blue

A strong, classic blue — denim and deep ocean. Not turquoise, not neon.

Green

A deep, grown-up green — pine trees and moss, not lime or grass.

Composition tips

Fill the frame, large subjects. Crop tight. A wide landscape with a tiny figure in the distance won’t read across the room — but a close portrait, a kid mid-laugh, or a tight shot of fall leaves will. Wallie rewards bold, large subjects with content edge-to-edge.
Let textures show. Bark, fabric, water, skin — texture is what makes e-ink look like a print.
Embrace shadows. Don’t shy away from dark photos. A moody, contrasty image often looks better on Wallie than a bright one with empty sky.
Mind the orientation. Wallie can be hung portrait or landscape. Pick photos that match the frame’s orientation, or use the app’s crop tool.

Keep the whole photo — with a border

By default the editor fills the frame: you pan and zoom, and whatever is inside the crop window is what Wallie shows, edge to edge. Sometimes you’d rather see all of a photo — a square, a panorama, a portrait on a landscape frame — than lose its edges.

Tap Fit (the second control on the left edge of the crop window, under Landscape / Portrait) and the whole photo drops into the window with a border around it. You can still pinch to zoom and drag to place it. The border is painted onto the frame in one of Wallie’s own inks — pick it from the swatches at the top right of the editor, or from the Border chip in the Adjust bar: white, black, red, yellow, blue or green. White reads like a mat around a print; black turns the frame into a gallery slide.

Tap Fill to go back to the edge-to-edge crop.

Let Wallie AI do the heavy lifting

When you crop a photo before sending it, the phone app gives you a Wallie AI option (look for the ✨ button). Tap it and our AI takes a pass at the photo specifically for the e-ink display:

Boosts color so it carries on Wallie’s palette
Lifts shadows so detail comes through in darker areas
Sharpens detail so texture reads clearly across the room
Optimizes for the display — small adjustments tuned to how e-ink renders

You’ll see an Original vs. AI Enhanced preview side by side and can pick whichever you like before sending. Most photos look better after a Wallie AI pass — it’s the easiest way to make a good photo great.

Photos that already have rich contrast and color you love? Skip it; the original will look great too.

Frame look — how light your photos print

Wallie’s white is a soft paper white rather than a glowing screen, so a photo that looks right on your phone can read a touch dark on the wall, especially in a dim room. Frame look is the one control for that. Four steps, no sliders:

Look	When to pick it
Softer	A bright, sunlit wall. Deeper shadows, quieter whites
Standard	How Wallie has always printed
Brighter	Faces and mid-tones lifted, with pale skin held back from going flat
Brightest	The most light the inks can give — a dim hallway or corner

For one photo: open it, tap Edit Photo, then Adjust, and tap Frame look in the strip beside E-ink Boost. (Told us a photo looks too dark? Brighten this photo on that sheet takes you straight here.) The preview updates as you tap; Done keeps it. A look you pick here stays with that photo.

Not sure which? Tap Show me at the top of that sheet. Wallie renders the photo four times and shows them as one picture — Softer top-left, Standard top-right, Brighter bottom-left, Brightest bottom-right. Split cuts one picture into quarters, so you compare the steps on the same faces; Four up shows the whole photo four times. Tap a quarter to pick it.

See it on the wall. Under the compare, Preview on frame paints that same four-way picture on your frame, the way Save & Preview paints a photo. Your screen can’t show what the inks do in your room; the glass can. The frame keeps the compare until your next save puts the photo back, so pick a look and tap Save & Preview when you’ve decided.

For every photo: Profile → Photo Processing → Frame look, then Save. New photos use it from then on; photos already on your frames keep their look until you reprocess them (see below). A photo you gave its own look in the editor keeps that one.

Brighter looks lift the darker faces in a photo more than the pale ones, which is what a plain brightness slider can’t do — so a mother and toddler both come up without the toddler washing out.

Your edits are remembered

If you crop a photo, rotate it, or tweak the colour and light controls, the app saves all of those settings with the photo. Open the same photo’s edit screen later and the crop window, your rotation, and every slider come back exactly where you left them — nudge the crop, or just tap Done to keep it as-is. No more starting over.

Photo processing gets better over time

Turning a photograph into something that looks right on e-ink is a tuning problem, and it’s one we keep working at. We test against real photographs — actual originals people have sent to their frames, not lab images — and each round of tuning gets a little closer.

That means the processing your photos went through is the version that existed when you added them. When we improve it, new photos pick up the change automatically. Older ones stay as they are until you ask for them to be redone.

Try it on one photo

The quickest way to see the difference:

Pick a photo you thought looked flat, or grainy next to the original.
Open it, make a small edit — nudge the crop, touch a slider — and save.
That single image goes through the current processing and comes back updated.

Now you can compare before deciding whether to redo anything else.

Redo your whole library

Profile → Photo Processing → Reprocess Images, then choose an album or your entire library.

It runs in the background. How long depends on how many photos you have — a few minutes for most libraries. You can leave the app while it works.

What doesn’t get redone

Photos enhanced with Wallie AI are skipped. Those went through a different pipeline and already have their own processing, so a reprocess would have nothing to add.
Photos already on the current version are skipped automatically, so running it twice costs nothing.

If you reprocess and only some of your photos change, that’s why — not a fault.

→ Troubleshooting if a photo isn’t appearing at all. → Battery & power for how long a charge lasts and what affects it.