Photo

Samsung's photos don't play well with iOS 4.2 [WP7 Bug]

By Daniel Rubino, Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011 at 1:01 pm

Here's an interesting, if somewhat odd bug found with Samsung Windows Phones: if you send a photo to any device with iOS 4.2, upon saving the photo, it renders it unreadable. So you can preview it when attached in an email (like above) but if you save it to the Photo Library, you get the gray JPG image and no pic. And indeed, we replicated the problem ourselves.

Strange, right?

A simple work around is to use a 3rd party editor like Thumba 2 or Pictures Lab--those programs will alter the JPG header data in such a way as to render this (ba-zing) a non-issue. Of course, that's no excuse for Samsung (or Apple) to not take a look at this and address the issue for those iOS devices and Samsung phones.

Further discussion can be found in the Microsoft Answers forum. Thanks, Not Shred, for the tip!

Ask WPCentral : Photo GPS data and Facebook

By George Ponder, Tuesday, Nov 16, 2010 at 2:05 am

yellow_tweety_64 sent in the following question concerning photos tagged with GPS coordinates:

"If I posted a picture on Facebook that was taken with a GPS enabled camera, would a person be able to lift the coordinates off of it?"

While we had our suspicions as to what the answer was, we did a little field test to confirm our initial thoughts. To see how it turned out and if the GPS coordinates from your Windows Phone transfers to Facebook, follow the break.

Windows Phone 7 photo & video features

By Daniel Rubino, Monday, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:51 am

The other day, Microsoft held and hour long video-chat on Windows Phone 7 and photography.

Not a whole 'lotta interesting info was gleaned, though it's still worth a watch for your diehards.

Video recording had a brief focus at the beginning where it was noted VGA recording is the minimum but OEMs can boost that up to HD and the device can handle it with no problem.

There seems to be some confusion over this last part at MobileTech World (who did a nice summary) where it was implied that it could record HD but not play it back. In fact, the question was convoluted: it assumed you had HD content from your DSLR camera and wanted to transfer it to your Phone--this is done through the Zune software. But if the phone has an HD camera, it can record and playback content with no problem.

Other aspects covered were:

no touch focus (use hardware button); no face detection
no in-depth video editing e.g. red-eye correction; MS is relying on 3rd parties to fill that gap
Automatic syncing/resizing to Facebook, SkyDrive (25GB free space) and Live services
Full size for emailing
GPS tagging supported
no HDMI out in the chassis spec
5MP in minimum; emphasis on quality sensors/hardware

You can watch the whole video here if you're really bored.

[Microsoft via MobileTech World]

Paint Now! Mobile: excellent image editor (freeware)

By Daniel Rubino, Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 7:52 pm

For those who like to do some pretty basic editing of photos before you ship them off to your Facebook, Twitter or email, you'll want to take a look at this great little app by XDA member 'menos'.

Think of it as analogous to MS Paint.

You simply run the program, open an image (.png, .jpg, .bmp) and from there you can crop, draw shapes e.g. circle, speech bubbles (very cool), eye dropper for color sample, resize and it even has an undo button.

The buttons are sort of tiny, so while it worked on my 3.2" eXpo, it was a little difficult. However, devices with 3.6" or larger screens should have no issues.

Overall, considering the price (free, but donation encouraged), this app can go up against the much more pricey "professional" competitors on the market. We give it a big thumbs up as it made my Chinese rice-monster very happy.

Head to XDA forums to download.

Resco shows off Photo Viewer alpha - looks awesome

By Phil Nickinson, Thursday, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:29 am

Looks like Resco is finally turning its attention to the aging Photo Viewer app, which while very popular and powerful has become quite dated in terms of UI (see our earlier review).

In their forums (via ppcgeeks) they are showing off their "alpha" version, meaning this is very early in development. Having said that, we gave it a spin on our Treo Pro and, darn it all ... the thing runs very well.

What can you expect? How about it is very fast in terms of the UI and loading photos, the UI is gorgeous and very intuitive. We especially like the easy zoom feature and the much-needed "touch" interaction.

Also, there's:

G-sensor support
Touch friendlyness
The folder shows the preview of the pictures inside it
100% zoom in and out using double clicking (zoom the double clicked area)
Thumbnail and list view and multiselection operations
Direct access to the camera
Upload to Facebook, Flickr

Normally we steer you guys clear of betas, let alone alphas, but in this case we're going to have to give a thumbs up as it seems quite stable and harmless (it's about 2mb for the install.). Take a peek after the break for a few screenshots.

Exe installation file | Cab installation file