Tips & Tricks
The little things that make photography and video easier on your iPhone. We digg them and we love sharing them with you! Enjoy...
We’ve shared with you before the technique to use the Hoodman HoodLoupe as a viewfinder for point&shoot cameras, DSLRs and even the iPhone. So it is good news that Hoodman recently released a 3 inch version of the popular HoodLoupe
. Since most point&shoot now feature 3 inch LCD’s, you get perfect coverage with the new HoodLoupe. You can also use the Cinema Strap
(not included) to secure the HoodLoupe to the back of your DSLR or point&shoot camera.
For the iPhone, we still recommend using the smaller HoodLoupe to have better access to the camera button on the screen. If you prefer the 3 inch HoodLoupe instead, simply slide it to the left on the iPhone screen to continue to have access to the camera button.
See our post about using the Hoodman as a viewfinder for the iPhone as to why we like using it.
Price:
Hoodman HoodLoupe 3.0: $79.99, Amazon: $78.95.
Hoodman Cinema Strap: $19.99, Amazon: $16.81.
If you need to quickly display your iPhone pictures on a map to see where they were taken, give Photo Map a try.
Photo Map does one thing well – read the GPS information that is stored in every iPhone photo, then map the data to a Google map and display it on your iPhone screen. As you zoom in and out of the map, photos get collapsed or expanded to fit on the screen, so you can best visualize your geotagged photos.
A nice by-product of Photo Map – you can check out whether any of your photos contains faulty GPS data. In the screenshot on the right, you can see two identical photos of the Sausalito harbor placed on different spots of the map – one in Sausalito, one in South San Francisco. By checking the GPS data embedded in the two images, it turned out that the GPS metadata was actually stored incorrectly for one photo when it was taken. Unfortunately, Photo Map does not allow you to repair the wrong data. But then, it’s a free app that does well what it is supposed to do – display photos on a map.
Verdict: Recommended.
Price: free from iTunes.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the T-Mobile Sidekick data loss fiasco. The Sidekick is based on the now Microsoft owned Danger platform, which is basically a thin client. This means that all the data, including text messages and contacts, are stored on the server. During an upgrade, Hitachi wiped out the server data and the backup. As a result, T-Mobile is now offering Sidekick subscribers to be released from their 2-year contracts, since Microsoft cannot restore the service and all the data is lost.
The Sidekick fiasco is not an isolated incident. Just this morning, MaximumPC reported that “Facebook pulled a Sidekick” and cut about 150,000 users. While access has been restored by now, all of last week’s data is lost. And TUAW (The unofficial Apple Weblog) reports about a MobileMe snafu that exposed personal data to strangers when renewing your MobileMe subscription. John Dvorak is right with his assessment that the EULA (End User License Agreement) is the main culprit, since it allows cloud providers to be lax about their practices.
Can something like this happen to the iPhone, all of its data, photos and videos?
With the iPhone, you are somewhat safer:
- Most of your data, such as address book, photos or videos, is stored on the iPhone itself and not just in the cloud
- Whenever you synch your iPhone with your Mac or PC, your data is backed up
- Ditto when you upgrade the iPhone OS. In that case, a full backup of all iPhone data is performed.
Your iPhone data, photos and videos should be pretty safe. But it’s always good computing practice to also backup your PC or Mac. Joe outlined his thoughts about photo storage a while ago, whereas I back everything up on my Drobo and an additional backup device (and the most important data also into the cloud).
I know it’s a hassle to back up, but just ask T-Mobile Sidekick users how they feel about having to re-enter all of their data manually, if at all possible.
One of the hidden gems that comes with every Mac is Image Capture. Originally intended to connect your digital camera to your Mac, it also works for the iPhone. Plus, it has a few very impressive tricks built right into it.
Quickly build web photo galleries or PDF contact sheets with Image Capture
Once your iPhone is connected and you have Image Capture fired up, the iPhone, any digital camera or any memory card show up under Devices. Browse your images in list or thumbnail view, enlarge thumbnails and copy selected or all photos to your hard drive or into Mail or iPhoto. Yes, it is that simple.
But that’s not all. Image Capture has some impressive additional tricks up its sleeve:
- Use Image Capture to take photos directly from the Mac (does not work for the iPhone and not for all cameras, although it typically works for Canon point&shoots)
- Want to scan something? Connect a scanner, then scan directly from Image Capture
- Create PDF contact sheets or web photo galleries
- Share your iPhone (in the lower left of the screen) and immediately access your iPhone photos from any computer on your network.
If you are a proud Mac owner and have not discovered Image Capture yet (or have not used it in a while), give it a try – it’s worth it!
Supported image formats: Anything that iPhoto can read: JPEG, PNG, TIF, PSD and almost all current RAW formats.
