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Exploring Photography on the iPhone
With the iPod Photo, Apple first allowed users to place their photo collections on iPods. This is something of a gimmick, however, for while it sounds neat, the iPod's small screen and the inability to zoom in on photos makes it rather useless.

This changes with the iPhone, however. Its large widescreen is ideal for photographic slideshows and the fingertip interface makes manipulating your collection easy and fun. At the iPhone unveiling Steve Jobs talked about "touching your music" but let me tell you, touching your pictures is even better.

My mom just returned from a three-month mission trip to Togo in West Africa, and now whenever anyone expresses an interest, she pulls out her iPhone and brings up her Togo photography collection. It's wonderfully interactive. She touches photos, explains the context, double-taps to zoom in on a person and tells her story, swipes to the next picture, and people are fascinated. It's often hard to tell if people are more interested in her pictures or her iPhone! (One guy joked he was wondering how fast she could run if he tried to make off with her iPhone.)

The ability to flip through photos with a hand swipe and the automatic rotation of images when you merely turn the iPhone makes it incredibly easy to show off your photos. With no-brainer syncing of photos from iPhoto to iPhone, even my mom can figure out how to use the thing -- and she loves it!

What's amazing here is that the iPhone's picture feature, instead of being a mere add-on, an extra feature cluttering up things and never used because it's so complicated, is a central part of the entire device. It feels perfectly natural to have your photos so close and handy, and there's nothing odd at all about whipping out the phone to show off pictures of grandkids or vacation slides or whatever.

Pictures are a key part of the iPhone. Just like iPhoto is an integrated part of a Macintosh, with other applications accessing your photo library for convenient importing of photographs, on the iPhone your photos can be used as wallpaper (the default image you see upon waking your phone) or assigned to contacts.

There's a built-in camera, of course, and while it's never going to replace a real camera (and it shouldn't), it's surprisingly decent. The camera does not do well in low light or capture movement very well, nor are faraway details particularly clear, but it's great for closeups of faces, group shots, and quick snaps when you didn't bring your bigger camera with you. The 2-megapixel resolution is not bad -- the camera's limited optics are more of a liability than the resolution. The camera does capture good color if there's the right amount of light. It is a little finicky -- you may have to move around a bit and adjust the lighting until the display shows the right image, but if you're patient, you can take excellent pictures with it.

The camera application is frighteningly simple: there are only two buttons: one for taking a picture and one for reviewing photos you've taken. Nearly the full iPhone screen is reserved as a preview of the photo you're about to take, which is excellent.

However, the photo taking button is small and awkward to press while you're holding the iPhone as a camera. That's because the button is on the face of the display. When you're holding the phone as a camera, the display is flat to your face. Taking a picture one-handed is almost impossible unless you press the button with your nose. A better solution would be for Apple to override the volume control hardware switch on the side of the iPhone so that when the iPhone is in picture-taking mode the volume control acts as a shutter release button. That would feel more like a traditional camera. At minimum, Apple could make the entire screen act as a shutter button. Either of these solutions could be enacted via a software update, so I hope the camera features will be enhanced in future upgrades.

Minor interface gripes aside, at least the camera's easy to use. Millions of people have cameras on their phones and never use them because they are so difficult. The iPhone not only makes picture-taking self-explanatory, it is powerful. For instance, after taking a picture you can review it with one tap to reveal the Camera Roll album which holds all the pictures you've taken on the iPhone. When you tap a picture it expands to full screen and there's a button in the corner that brings up your options: you can use the photo as wallpaper, email it to someone, or assign it to a contact. One nice touch is that when you assign it to a contact you can zoom in (via a pinch gesture) and the iPhone will resize and crop the photo as you've indicated. This is handy for pulling a single face out of a group shot, for instance.

One neat aspect about assigning photos to contacts I didn't realize is that these are copied back to your Mac's Address Book when you sync. Naturally a contact's photo is displayed on the iPhone when the person calls, but what I didn't know is that in Apple Mail if a contact has a photo it is displayed when you view an email from that person!

The iPhone does support a slideshow feature for displaying your photos, but it's unfortunately rather limited. Within Settings you only have a few options: time for each slide (2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds), transition (Cube, Dissolve, Ripple, Wipe Across, Wipe Down), Repeat (on/off), and Shuffle (on/off). I would like to see the ability to map slideshows to music, set the length of the entire slideshow, and offer "random" as a choice for the transition. Even better would be if your slideshow settings for albums in iPhoto would be preserved and used on the iPhone.

Still, I don't know how often one just sits and watches a slideshow, so the limitations are minor. iPhones apparently don't support being connected to a TV the way video iPods can, so it's much more natural to play with the photos and move them at your own speed with finger swipes.

Prior to using an iPhone I thought the photo feature was nice but not essential. Now, after having it, I'm starting to think it's a key function of the device.

Next: In Part 8, Marc checks out iPhone Mail.

macopinion@designwrite.com

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 1 of 10
Buying the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 2 Of 10
Activation and Syncing

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 3 of 10
Using the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 4 of 10
Customization

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 5 of 10
Exploring the Applications

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 6 of 10
Exploring the Internet

iPhone: First Impressions Part 7 of 10
Exploring Photography on the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 8 of 10
Working With eMail

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 9 of 10
Using the iPhone as a Phone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 10 of 10
iPod on the iPhone