Whenever I downloaded pictures from my Mac to my iPhone through iTunes, I felt they looked quite soft and not at all how I intended them to be. Thus, I recently set out to find an alternative and found one: Flickr!
When you import photos to your iPhone, iTunes does its “magic”. Initially, I hoped that all iTunes did was scaling it down to the iPhone’s resolution (480 x 320 x 163 dpi). But unfortunately, it does more, thus leaving me with unsatisfactory results and no way for me to influence the outcome of the “magic” process. So I conducted a little test to see whether this could be done any better using Flickr.
Much better image when displayed via Flickr
I took one photo taken with a Canon 5D at a recent classic car show and created a 960 x 480 x 163 dpi test image (twice the size of the iPhone screen), which was then uploaded into iPhoto. I then used iTunes to transfer the image to my iPhone. It ended up looking blurry (The same happened even if I scaled the image back to 480 x 320 regardless of the dpi setting).
In parallel, I uploaded the test image to Flickr and used the free version of Darkslide to display the image on my iPhone (I also used the free Klick app with the same result – there are other free and for-pay apps to display Flickr images). The Flickr image looked much better – in fact it looked pretty much the same as the original.
In the future, when I want to display my photos on my iPhone, I will use Flickr. And since I don’t want to have to rely on Internet access whenever I show them, I simply take screen captures of the Flickr images and leave them on my iPhone. As long as you don’t sync them through iTunes, your pictures will look great!
p.s.
The test was conducted on iTunes 8.2 and an iPhone3G running iPhone 3.0. Since it is an iTunes problem, I don’t see any reason why it would look better on an iPhone 3GS
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