According to the manual, you have to buy 3d party software (Adobe Elements or some other one) but Apple couldn’t be that stupid, could they?
I mean, they’ve been advertising how great the camera is on the new 3GS iPhone (and it is pretty spiffy. So there has to be a way to get pictures on and off the damn thing. It’s 1/3d of the functionality of the iPhone (internet browser/camera/cell-phone). It would be like having a cell phone that says “Well, you can hear though the speaker perfectly well, but if you want to talk back to whoever’s calling, you better go out and buy a microphone.”
I’m using Vista and yeah, you can see the iPhone in Device Manger…you can even explore it. But you can’t copy stuff to and from.
If there’s a way to do it in iTunes, I’m damned if I can see it.
Apple really, really, really doesn’t want people to see the innards of the iPhone. Therefore, you can’t simply copy things to and from it, as you would with a USB Mass Storage Device.
I’ve been using iTunes: plug the iPhone in and wait for it to show up at the left. Then you can select various things to sync to the iPhone: videos, music, apps, and so on. This moves files to the phone. If you buy something through iTunes or the App Store on the phone, this syncing will also move those files back to your computer.
To get pictures and videos (but not music) off the phone, I was using iPhoto. There may be other programs that also do this.
Another route is to use a program like DataCase, which creates a completely-separate private filesystem for itself and then sets up a server that you can link to over WiFi. The filesystem is visible by FTP or as a shared drive under AFP or HTTP, and you can copy music and pictures to and from it. It doesn’t give you access to the interior of the phone and the other information there, though.
I’ve gotten that far, but I’ll be damned if I can see photos. I’ve got my address book updated and I want to UL a pic of a friend to go with his contact info. There doesn’t seem to be any way in iTunes to get the photo onto the phone.
Looks like Windows Photo Gallery can get stuff off the Iphone, but not on. Hmmm.
You guys are giving me hives. I just watched the “guided tour” streaming video clip, which makes it sound as if everything just does what you expect it to do. But, you’re saying, no it doesn’t?
My BIL is constantly sending me photos of my niece from his iphone. I assumed there was some easy way to attach photos to e-mails with it. Was my assumption wrong?
The phone works like a perfectly tuned Swiss clock.
The manual was written by drooling chimpanzees who were drunk and possibly retarded. Huge important bits are left out*. Like this one. How can you have a camera (and that was a huge selling point for the phone) and not discuss how you get the pictures on and off of it–in a 215 page manual, they devote three (3) sentences to “Buy other people’s software”.
The iTunes software is clunky, bloated, and kinda stupid. I’ve gotten more “No, you can’t do that” pop-up boxes in the last 24 hours than I’ve gotten in the last two years. And the help file is so-so at best. And it doesn’t seem to follow most Windows standards (there’s no File/Edit/View bar of menus across the top**, etc), so you have to kinda figure it out as your going.
*For example, while the instructions do say the the very first thing you have to do is install iTunes, it doesn’t actually tell you that iTunes will activate your phone. So I spent a half hour trying to figure out what number to call to activate it. That said, once I did it, it worked beautifully–quickest activation I’ve ever had. But it would have been nice for them to, y’know…say so.
**Actually it does, but for some reason, someone tacked a crappy MP3 player on top of iTunes (which is a file manager) and as far as I can tell the menu bar only refers to the inexplicably placed MP3 player. There are no controls for the file manager. It’s like having a car that someone stuck an electric mixer and blender onto the hood. Remember those old “Reeces Peanut Butter Cup” commercials? “You’ve got chocolate in my peanut butter!”? It’s like that–“You’ve tacked a media player onto a file manager”
I don’t have an iPhone. I have a Storm. But I would have also assumed that the easiest way to transfer would be to simply email it.
The instructions for the Storm where also written by a bunch of monkeys. It is my first smart phone and I was completely clueless. I said to hell with it and just called tech support whenever I had a question. Thankfully, it is really, really well supported.
To get photos on the iPhone is very easy, when the phone is plugged in select the photos tab in iTunes and select the folder(s) you want to sync with your phone.
To get pictures that you have taken with the iphone camera onto your computer should also be easy. On my computer (windows XP) the dialog comes up asking what program I want to use to view the files. I choose the windows scanner and camera wizard and it pulls them off no problem. I am sure there are other programs that would also work fine.
The only thing that is difficult is taking photos that you have uploaded and moving them to a different computer. You can email them but the iphone automatically reduces the size. There are third party apps that let you do this though.
You can get them through browsing the iPhone’s directory in “Computer/My Computer.” Open that up, and the iPhone should be listed in the same area as the removable drives. Click on it, and it will let you go into the folders that store the pictures. Copy them and paste them wherever you want.
This. I do it all the time. In fact, it never even occurred to me to look up the manual, or to try it through iTunes. Maybe I was wrong to just assume that something you could plug in to your USB port would work like any other USB device, but it did.
FWIW, the iPhone works perfectly with Apple’s own iPhoto that is part of their iLife suite of apps (it comes with the purchase of a Mac). Unfortunately, it’s not made for the PC, and I’m sure they don’t intend to, as that’s part of the draw Apple has sewn together… seamless integration between all their hardware and software. If you go “off-the-grid”, you’re on your own.
Glad to know there are 3rd-party photo apps that play nice with the iPhone on a PC. Enjoy your iPhone, my 3GS arrives this week!
When I first bought my iphone, my biggest disappointment was that I had to e-mail photos one at a time. For 3.0, they added the ability to share photos in groups. Only it seems to have a limit to the number of photos you can e-mail at a time. Why should it be limited to 5?