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.
Do you still shoot film, maybe with one of these great Leica cameras? Do you carry a light table with you, since you need to look at film or slides when you travel?
Now there’s an alternative to carrying a heavy light table. It’s an iPhone app called Film Light.
Select from preset film or slider templates or create your own custom template. Then put the film or slide on top of the iPhone screen to view it. Only the defined viewing area is back-lit, the rest of the iPhone screen is grayed out to prevent peripheral light interference. To resize a template simply touch anywhere in the main view, then drag while observing the screen’s center as the anchor point. Use built-in safeguards against unintentional touches via a locking mechanism for template resizing. Film Light also supports full accelerator-based rotation.
An adjustable temperature slider grants users full control over warm and cool degrees of light to maintain an accurate representation of the inherent colors of film positives.
Price: $1.99 from iTunes.
Update: A reader asked the question why images transferred via Dropbox are much smaller than if they are transferred back via regular synch. There are two reasons why this is the case:
- Dropbox strips metadata, such as EXIF, IPTC and GPS meta tags
- Dropbox seems to recompress images, even although I could not really see a difference in 100% crops.
Stripping of metadata is an important consideration. In most of my images, I don’t really need metadata, thus I do not mind it being stripped. In others, I do. The safest way is to transfer them via Dropbox, but also transfer them through a regular synch. That way, you have two copies, the compressed and stripped Dropbox version and the original photo.
One of my favorite services, Dropbox, is now available not only on Mac and PC, but also as an iPhone app. It allows me to sync files between all three as I see fit, plus it adds viewing capability of all kinds of file formats to my iPhone. Cool!
But the iPhone app has another trick up its sleeve: Immediately synch your iPhone photos to the Cloud, and thus to all your desktops. Here’s how it works:
- In Dropbox on your iPhone, click on Photos
- Click the camera icon in the upper right
- Either use the camera app to take a photo or select an existing photo from the camera roll
- Once selected, Dropbox will upload it immediately into the Cloud and from there automatically downloads it to all your PCs and Macs
- Rinse and repeat
Very cool. In my case, I don’t upload photos as I take them – I usually take a bunch of photos and when on a break, I upload them all.
One minor downside: Dropbox uses its own version of the picture viewer, which currently does not support pinch to zoom when viewing photos in Dropbox. That’s not important to me at all – I solely use Dropbox to upload images and Apple’s Photos program to view them.
Verdict: Highly recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!
Price: Free from iTunes.
One of my favorite services, Dropbox, is now available not only on Mac and PC, but also as an iPhone app. It allows me to sync files between all three as I see fit, plus it adds viewing capability of all kinds of file formats to my iPhone. Cool!
But the iPhone app has another trick up its sleeve: Immediately synch your iPhone photos to the Cloud, and thus to all your desktops. Here’s how it works:
- In Dropbox on your iPhone, click on Photos
- Click the camera icon in the upper right
- Either use the camera app to take a photo or select an existing photo from the camera roll
- Once selected, Dropbox will upload it immediately into the Cloud and from there automatically downloads it to all your PCs and Macs
- Rinse and repeat
Very cool. In my case, I don’t upload photos as I take them – I usually take a bunch of photos and when on a break, I upload them all.
One minor downside: Dropbox uses its own version of the picture viewer, which currently does not support pinch to zoom when viewing photos in Dropbox. That’s not important to me at all – I solely use Dropbox to upload images and Apple’s Photos program to view them.
Verdict: Highly recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!
Price: Free from iTunes.
