The Photo Frame That Refuses to Pick a Favourite

It arrives in a wooden box lined with soft grey felt, and it is genuinely beautiful: a slim walnut frame, brushed brass at the corners, a screen so good that the picture inside it looks like paper. You stand it on the shelf by the window, connect it to your phone, and it begins. Sunset. Sunset. Sunset. The same sunset, from the same balcony, on the same evening in August, sixty-three times in a row, one per second, and then round again from the top.

The Frame That Refuses to Choose has exactly one design principle, printed on a small card tucked under the lid. It is not the frame's place to decide which of your photographs is the good one. Every other device on earth will quietly hide the near-misses and show you the keeper. This frame regards that as editorial arrogance of the worst kind. You took all sixty-three. All sixty-three go up.

The effect is closer to animation than to photography. Over the course of a minute the sun sinks a finger's width, a gull crosses the top left corner, comes back, thinks better of it and leaves again, and somebody's elbow enters the shot at picture forty-one and is never satisfactorily explained. Visitors sit down in front of it. Several have described it as the most gripping thing in the room, which was not the intention, given that it is a frame for still photographs.

There are two buttons on the back. The first is marked FAVOURITE, and pressing it makes a small symbol spin briefly in the corner of the screen, after which nothing whatsoever changes. The second is marked DELETE. Pressing that produces a soft chime and the words are you sure. Pressing yes produces the words are you certain. There is no third question and no confirmation, and the photograph is still there in the morning, in its place, between forty and forty-two.

The manufacturers are entirely unrepentant. Their catalogue points out that the frame has never once lost a picture, that no customer has ever had to say they wish they had kept the other one, and that a device which hides forty-eight of your fifty photographs is not a photo frame at all but a critic with a power supply. This is technically unanswerable, which is the most irritating thing about the whole product.

Households adapt. In most homes the frame migrates within a fortnight from the living room to the hall, where you meet it in passing and collect four sunsets on the way to the front door. One owner reports that her family now uses the word sunset for any long, repetitive, faintly hypnotic experience, including the school run. Another has simply stopped taking more than one photograph of anything, ever, which the manufacturers would like it noted is a feature and not a side effect.

And that is the true thing hiding underneath the joke. Almost nobody takes one picture of a sunset. We take a burst of them, on the entirely reasonable theory that one will turn out to be the good one, and then we never go back and pick it, because picking means looking closely at sixty-three near-identical images and admitting out loud that fifty-nine of them are the same picture. So they all stay. A modern camera roll is mostly duplicates that survived because nobody had the appetite to sort them, and the unsorted pile grows quietly, year after year, backed up and carried from phone to phone like furniture nobody wants to move. The frame is not inventing an absurdity at all. It is showing you the pile you already own, one second at a time, and declining to be tasteful about it.