justG's dashboard

I hope you don't mind my bumping this thread, but I was suprised to see a tweet from @trevypoos on my wife's 'home' timeline (since she follows him as well), but not mine! It kinda makes me wonder how many other tweets I've missed...

This is the tweet that never turned up, incidentally:

http://twitter.com/trevypoos/statuses...

It's not a reply.. it's simply not there (nor is it on my m.twitter.com feed)! I'm worried that I'm missing out on (a small percentage of) the fun!

I've been stuck in a hospital for a week without my laptop but with my iphone. I'm starting to understand that the iphone is a bigger vehicle for community online than my computers: it's at where I am.

I'd love to have a photostream of my stay via exposure ... facebook just didn't work. Maybe one photo at a time limitation? "Mobile Foto" promises to do some uploading...but your application looks better built. Even if it's one photo at a time: please allow me to upload photos spontaneously with geotags to build a better photostream. I don't need ALL the photo roll ... I can live with a few or one-at-a-time ... I understand there are limitations with bandwidth and connection reliability. I can live with lower resolution photos (as a limitation from my iphone) so long I can get content online. I can wait for higher resolution photo's when I'm in front of my mac's.

thx!

Less applications! just let Exposure Pro enable the upload of photos!

@gavin Yes, NDA and all that. Let me just say that I think Apple apps have some special privileges.

@Fraser thanks for the feedback on batch uploading, it makes sense.

The way that mail on the iPhone handles resending failed email might be one approach. The alleged abilities of the 2.1 SDK to support background notifications might allow for a background queue of images to be sent when a 3G or wifi network is encountered I guess. Obviously with the ever helpful NDA in place you can't comment publicly about this.

thanks though

@gavin: Right now, I'm not ready to offer batch uploading support. In particular, I worry that it sets up false expectations of reliability on a device with a (likely) highly intermittent network connection. Maybe once there's some more experience with handling flaky networks.....

@Jesse: I can't say a huge amount because of the ongoing NDA, but it has been reported that most of the issues you raise arise from limitations in iPhone OS (you can kind of assume that by the fact that all apps that are trying to do this have the same kinds of limitations).

I think having the facility within Exposure is best. Shaking to switch the camera on is trick. Do it. – Gwylfa, on July 26, 2008 20:01

I think having the facility within Exposure is best. Shaking to switch the camera on is trick. Do it. – Gwylfa, on July 26, 2008 20:01

As much as I would LOVE to have direct uploading from Exposure OR a separate app, there is one major problem I've observed so far that *seems* to be an API limitation.

I'm hoping Fraser can offer some feedback on the following issues I've noticed from using other apps:

Firstly, in looking at other apps and methods of uploading pictures, it would appear that ALL EXIF DATA is stripped out when sending photos from the iPhone. This applies to e-mailing photos through Apple's own iPhone Mail app, as well as taking photos with Mobile Fotos or other similar apps. This means that things like the camera model and more importantly the geotag data that the iPhone nicely adds will NOT be included if you send to Flickr directly from the iPhone. If this is truly an API limitation, then you're pretty much stuck uploading your pictures via your computer anyway to retain that data.

On the other hand, perhaps the other apps are simply being lazy when converting the photos, and there actually *is* a way to do this (crossing fingers -- AIrMe certainly does add the geo-tag data to apps that are taken directly with it, so I'm guessing it writes its own EXIF geotag data, but of course it provides no way to upload apps from the Camera Roll -- you have to take them via AirMe).

Secondly, it seems that photos accessed via the API from the "Camera Roll" are limited to a 640x480 resolution -- lower even than photos sent via the iPhone Mail app, which go out at 800x600. If this is also true, then this means that you'd be better off just e-mailing your photos from your camera roll into flickr, rather than having an application do it.

Pictures taken with the camera directly in an app still seem to be available at the full 1600 x 1200 resolution, but they still don't include the EXIF data -- possibly simply because it's the app's responsibility to write it to the photo in that case (ie, does the Camera app write the EXIF data on the iPhone, or is it written by the image capture API?).

If the above are not strictly API limitations, then Exposure could jump FAR ahead of the pack by figuring out a way to deal with higher resolution photos AND add geo-tag data. Thus far, the options are quite limited.... AirMe adds the geotag data, but only provides lower-res images and no way to browse the camera roll. Mobile Fotos provides 1600x1200 images with no EXIF geotag data at all, and sends camera roll photos out at 640x480.

The only problem I could see with adding-while-shooting is that it would slow down your shooting unless it was being done in the background. While it would be a very cool feature, I wouldn't want to have to wait between shots while they're uploaded to Flickr, even if that does only take a few seconds.

If it can be done in the background however while you keep shooting, that would be a VERY cool idea. – Jesse Hollington, on July 26, 2008 19:07

Personally, I'd be content just to see a small "Camera" button in the top-right corner of the screen, in much the same way that Facebook does this (and the built-in Camera app, for that matter -- if you go to your Camera Roll from the Camera app you'll see it appears there as a shortcut to return to the camera). – Jesse Hollington, on July 26, 2008 19:04

I like the "shake the iPhone" idea -- that's kind of cool. A good place for the camera icon would be the top-right corner, which is where it appears in the Facebook app, as well as when browsing the Camera Roll from the Camera app. – Jesse Hollington, on July 26, 2008 19:02

Personally, I would like to see it embedded in Exposure, if for no other reason than I have enough clutter on my main app screens without adding yet-another-app. Browsing the camera roll directly and uploading from there would be my preferred form, although I understand there are API limitations that preclude getting "full-size" photos up to Flickr unless you take them directly. – Jesse Hollington, on July 26, 2008 19:01

I think adding in photo uploading functionality including selecting a tag for the photo taken before upload would be nice. Also being able to just upload pictures, get geo location of them and allow you up tag before upload would be killer. Even AirMe does do that.

I've put in a question to Joe Hughes from Google who works on the Transit team. He might have an answer! – Chris Messina, on July 21, 2008 18:41

Chris, I don't think Google offers public transportation routing as part of their maps API. Unless we're overlooking it. Have you seen this offered via their API?

Having used my iPhone a bit more, a key feature in an upload application would be the ability to add photos to a batch and then upload them together, rather than one at a time.

I can see sense in having this as a separate application. Perhaps shaking Exposure launches the other app, but you can launch it independently. I know that Safari can be invoked in this manner, but I'm not sure if you can launch one app from another. Shades of Finder 6 Transfer....

Heck yes, that'd be awesome.

Always eager to hear your ideas, Chris. Makes sense to me. I'll be sure to pass it on to the rest of the team. Thanks!