iPhone Photo Video » Photo Viewing

Map your geotagged iPhone photos

Veit — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:46:23 +0000

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.

Use your iPhone as a portable light table

Veit — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:06:41 +0000

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.

Why iPhone photos are smaller when sent via Dropbox

Veit — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:29:23 +0000

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.

Synch your iPhone Photos to your desktop from anywhere right after taking them

Veit — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:42:53 +0000

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.

Verdict: Highly recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!

Price: Free from iTunes.

Protect iPhone photos from prying eyes

Veit — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:05:23 +0000

Are you worried that someone might discover iPhone photo “evidence” from the last party that nobody should ever see and that you simply forgot to delete?

Fear no more. Simply use Private Pics to password-protect your photos from prying eyes!

Features include:

Fully compatible with pictures from all iPhone devices
The longer the password the better the security
Set a decoy password
Create an entire decoy library
Save, view, and export pictures at original resolution
Swipe to change pictures
Pinch for zoom
View pictures in a slideshow
Arrange folders and pictures directly
Email pictures without exporting
Add multiple pictures from the image picker

Supported Languages: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese.

The free version is restricted to 1 folder and 10 images.

Price:
Private Pics: $1.99 from iTunes.
Private Pics Free: Free from iTunes.

ImagePro a fast way to access Google Images on your iPhone

Veit — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:04:36 +0000

IOco released ImagePro, an app to quickly search for images on Google on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In the app, you use the keyboard to enter your search criteria. ImagePro then serves up Google images in six panels, with the option to swipe left and right to navigate to see additional images. Tap on any image and you see it in full screen – you can even zoom in and out of any full-screen image. If need be, you can refine your search by using criteria such as content type (news, drawings, faces…), image size, color or file type.

In addition to viewing images, you can save images to your photo album on your iPhone, send them to Twitter or email them to friends.

Overall, ImagePro offers you a super-fast way to find images – certainly faster than accessing images.google.com in Safari on the iPhone.

The only downside for me: Many of the Google images are copyrighted. Unless I go to the actual site in the browser, there is no way to view the copyright information. Thus, if I simply start distributing Google images to Twitter or by email, I might be violating the copyright of these images. It would be great, if IOCo would build this into the app, maybe even in form of a pop-up warning me that a particular image is copyrighted before I send it to Twitter.

Price: $0.99 in iTunes.

Social power-user tool on the iPhone? Or a spammer’s delight?

Veit — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:40:07 +0000

There are few tools or services that can be looked at from two totally different angles. Posterous, which allows you to send an email whose content then gets posted to dozens of social network, is one of them. Many use it in sensitive ways, thus posting selectively. And others just blast everything to the entire world.

Posterous released a free version of its photo email for the iPhone, called PicPosterous. Similar to Posterous, it uses email to send out your images to your social networks. So simply take a new photo or select an existing one from the camera roll, then enter the email information and send it. It will show up on your social networks instantaneously.

Simply take an photo or select an image, then email it to posterous and it will show up on your social networks

If you want to selectively post your images to your social networks, this app might be your ticket. But you could also blast it to the world – and the world might not care for too long if you keep blasting away.

Price: free from iTunes.

Print your images at a kiosk, then view them on your iPhone

Veit — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

If you still go to your local retailer to get prints of your pictures, you can now get them on your iPhone as well. Of course that is only if your retailer or the kiosk where you order your prints runs on Lucidiom’s proprietary Photo Finale software.

If it does, every order represents a stream in the form of an RSS feed. Download their free Pocket Pics app from the AppStore, plug in the feed ID and enjoy all of your images on your iPhone.

Once you have the connection set up, Pocket Pics lets you:

View shared photos directly on your iPhone
Keep track of which photos you’ve seen and which are new
Share your photo collections via email
Save photos to your phone’s library

Of course, you could also simply upload your images to Flickr, if you have them in a digital format.

Simplify access to all of your photos on the iPhone

Veit — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:30:49 +0000

Do you need to have access to all of your images on your iPhone without sync’ing them? Do you have so many pictures that they don’t even fit on your iPhone?

Simplify Photo provides an easy remedy to this problem. As long as your home computer (PC, Mac or Linux) is running and connected to the Internet, you can access all of your images. Here is how it works:

Sign up for an account with SimplifyMedia
Download their Simplify Media software, then install and run it on your PC, Mac or Linux machine and sign in.
Download Simplify Photo to your iPhone, sign into your account and choose the photos you’d like to display.

Done. No uploading to Flickr, if you do not want to share your images and no sync’ing images to your iPhone. As long as your home computer is running, your images are accessible.

For quickly finding your images on your iPhone, you can browse by faces, places and events (from iPhoto), view by date and timeline, search by tag, title, comment and description, view by location (see image above), create slideshows and tag images as favorites.

Price: $0.99 in iTunes.

CBS EyeMobile the perfect vanity app

Veit — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:48:08 +0000

Do you want to be a “citizen-journalist”, which basically means that you get to help news corporations make money with your content that they would have to pay for otherwise? It’s easier than ever.

CBS is running the CBS EyeMobile site to make it easy for you to give them your content. Now you can also do it on your iPhone, with the CBS EyeMobile app. It allows you to take an image from within the app or select any of the photos in your camera roll. Simply add a subject line and a description, pick a category and upload the photo. Done.

Once the image is up, it can be accessed as a “Citizen Report”. People can vote on all of your images and videos. You can browse them online. And CBS can do anything with them.

It’s telling that the app does not include the terms under which they can use your image. To learn that, you have to go to their site and check out their terms of use. Section 12, to be exact. It’s a masterpiece of corporate legal agreement insofar that they can do anything with your content for free while you carry all the risk (and pay for all legal cost), including being sued by third parties that might find your content objectionable.

Personally, I’m no fan of giving away my photos to any organization where they get the rewards and I carry the risks, or enter any contest where the organizer claims the rights to my images (we don’t for our contest). If you would like to read more about photographers’ rights and stay on top of the latest schemes to undermine them, please visit Photo Business News and Forum. I’m a big supporter of John Harrington’s fight for us photographers, so I can recommend his site highly!

CBS EyeMobile is one of these vanity apps that you should use if you want bragging rights that one of your images or videos was on local, national or international news. In all other cases, I recommend you abstain.

Verdict: Not recommended.