FrameSaver or the Samsung Art Store: which should I use on my Frame TV?

The Art Store is a subscription billed through your Samsung account. At the time of review it is about $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year in the US, with a free trial on a new TV and occasional promotional pricing. A Frame purchase sometimes includes a few months free. Without a subscription, Art Mode still works with the small bundled set of art and with your own photos.

FrameSaver is free. There is no subscription, no ads, and no paid tier. The curated library, your own uploads, and every setting are included. It costs the electricity of running the TV in TV mode, which is more than Art Mode uses, and that is covered below.

The Art Store is the only licensed way to put well-known artworks on a Frame. It carries pieces from museums such as the Prado, the Albertina, and the Met, plus contemporary artists, photographers, and design collections, all cropped and colour-matched to the Frame mattes. If you have a specific painting in mind, this is where it lives.

FrameSaver is a photography library rather than a fine-art one. Every photo comes from an open-access source: Smithsonian Open Access, Wikimedia Commons featured pictures, NASA and the ESO, Hubble, and Webb observatories, the National Park Service, and Creative Commons photographers via Openverse. A person reviews each photo before it is shown, and categories cover landscapes, mountains, oceans, space, cities, architecture, animals, americana, black and white, seasonal, and minimal. Public-domain paintings are not the focus, so if you want Van Gogh on the wall the Art Store is the better fit.

This is the biggest practical difference. The Art Store lives in Art Mode, which the Frame enters when you press the power button. Art Mode runs the panel at low brightness, follows the motion sensor so the picture goes dark in an empty room, matches the matte to the art, and looks like a print because the TV is effectively off. It is what the Frame was designed around.

FrameSaver runs in the Frame TV web browser, which means the TV is in TV mode with the browser open. The photos are shown at full screen with your choice of frame or full-bleed, at the brightness of your normal picture settings, with transitions and a time per photo you set in seconds or minutes. The trade-offs are that the TV is on rather than in its low-power mode, and that the Auto Power Off timer needs to be turned off for an evening-long session. A separate guide covers the settings that keep the Samsung browser open.

The Art Store is built into the Frame. You sign in with a Samsung account, start the subscription, and browse from the Art Mode menu with the remote. It is only available on the Frame and a small number of newer Samsung models, and it is tied to that one TV.

FrameSaver needs no installation. Open framesaver.app in the TV browser, scan the QR code with your phone, and enter the 6-digit code from your email; the TV signs in on its own. The same account then works on any other screen with a browser: an LG or Google TV in another room, a laptop, or a phone. If your household has more than one screen, or the TV is not a Frame, this is the deciding factor.

Both handle personal photos. Art Mode accepts uploads through the SmartThings app or a USB drive, with USB preserving full resolution, and shows them with the same mattes as Art Store pieces. FrameSaver stores up to 20 photos per account in folders, at the size you upload them, and rotates them alongside or instead of the curated categories. Neither requires a subscription for this.

Art Mode is designed to be left on all day and draws far less than the TV does in normal use, partly because of the low brightness and partly because the motion sensor turns the panel off when nobody is around. FrameSaver keeps the TV in TV mode, so it draws roughly what watching television at the same brightness would. Lowering brightness and using the sleep timer overnight closes most of the gap. There is a separate guide on how much electricity a Frame TV uses.

Where each one wins, in one line apiece.

• Famous artworks: Art Store. FrameSaver is photography.
• Cost: FrameSaver is free. The Art Store is about $60 a year.
• Print-like look with the TV off: Art Store, through Art Mode.
• Rotating photography with transitions and short intervals: FrameSaver.
• More than one screen, or a TV that is not a Frame: FrameSaver.
• Lowest power use for all-day display: Art Store, through Art Mode.
• Your own photos: both, free.

Plenty of Frame owners do. Art Mode carries a few favourite paintings for daytime, when the TV is off and the room needs a print on the wall. FrameSaver runs in the evening or during a dinner party, when the TV is on anyway and a rotating gallery of space and landscape photography is more interesting than a single still. Nothing about one interferes with the other; the browser closes when you press power and Art Mode takes over.