It’s also worth pointing out that there are fairly intuitive processes for this from companies that care about design.
Apple, for example, makes this easy and discoverable. From my iPhone, if I’m near my computer, I can just go to the normal “share a photo” screen, and along with the options to email or text or facebook or tweet it, there’s a picture of my laptop with it’s name. I touch it and the photo sends. Ta da!
doesn’t apple have that whole airdrop thing where you can share photos with any apple device on the same network?
Thanks for all your comments iamthewalrus(:3=, I’m fascinated by UX design and I’m enjoying reading what you have to say.
I should point out that although I’m a software developer, I’m not a UI or UX expert. But I am also fascinated by it and at least conversant in many aspects of it.
I don’t want to use the cloud. I prefer to store my files locally, where they’re not dependent on slow and iffy connections. I back up by other means.
And I don’t want to have yet a third device from which I have to delete masses of email. There may be some way to set up the phone to send email without letting it download messages except when I ask it to and then only, say, from a specific day; but if so, I can’t find it. I don’t want to do email from the phone anyway, it’s a nuisance to type on and the screen’s too small to read anything much (see below, I need one that fits in a pocket). If I’m travelling somewhere and want email, I’'ll schlep the iPad.
The phone’s not an iPhone. I needed something nonbreakable and waterproof that I can carry in a pocket. Plus which although it was a gift price was a factor.
And I suspect you’re sending that photo either through the cloud or by Bluetooth – and again, Bluetooth didn’t work; for reasons that were entirely unexplained.
None of this really has to do with why a phone which comes with a Pictures folder doesn’t put pictures in the pictures folder, but instead several layers down behind a batch of non-obvious code names.
Who said anything about storing/backing up? I was meaning in the sense of using it as a temporary holding location that both devices can access.
When was the last time you had a slow or iffy enough connection that you couldn’t transfer stuff to the cloud and back down?
And re: DCIM vs “Pictures”, it’s because there’s actually a digital still camera standard for file storage structure- DCIM = “Digital Camera IMages”. Dedicated cameras have done that for decades now- phones are just adhering to the standard.
“Pictures” is probably some other folder that’s maybe created by the OS or whatever. It’s not standard for sure. And FWIW, on my phone, the pictures are stored in DCIM, even though in the Gallery they show up under “Pictures”.
Happens all the time. I don’t live in a city.
Connection disappears entirely a number of times every year, sometimes for several days. One reason I got the phone was for the hotspot – while both the ISP and the phone service are likely to go down occasionally, it’s less common for them to both be down at once. When the power’s out, I’ve got limited recharging capacity for the hotspot, though (and the modem will definitely be down when the power’s out.)
Yeah, I wasn’t offering that as a suggestion of a fix for your problem, but as a counter-example to show that there are actually well designed intuitive interfaces for the thing you were trying to do.
Sadly they do not exist on all products.