Chapter 9. Picture Your Photos on the iPod
Who wants to share treasured photos with friends if they’re in the cracked plastic picture sleeves of an overstuffed wallet? If you have an iPod Touch, Nano, or Classic, you can transfer your prized shots from your computer to your iPod and display them on a glossy color screen wherever you happen to be.
The picture-perfect fun doesn’t stop there, either. This trio of ‘Pods can create slideshows of your images right there in the palm of your hand. And as with many previous iPod models, you can plug any of the 2010 iPods into a TV set so you can see your stills on a big living-room screen. This chapter shows you how to do everything but microwave the popcorn.
Set Up: Get Ready to Put Photos on Your iPod
To move pictures to your ‘Pod, you need a computer loaded with iTunes and an iPod outfitted with a color screen, along with a couple of other things:
Compatible photo software for your Windows or Mac PC, or a folder of photos on your hard drive. iPods can sync with several popular photo programs that you may already use. Windows mavens can grab pictures from Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later. On the Mac, there’s Aperture or iPhoto 6 or later. You can also transfer pictures from a folder on your computer, like the Pictures (or My Pictures) folder on a Windows system, the Mac’s iPhoto Library folder (for those who haven’t upgraded past iPhoto 6), and even the Mac OS X Pictures folder.
Digital photographs in the proper format. iTunes plays well with the photo formats used by most digital cameras, web pages, and email programs, as well as a few other photo types. Windows users can display JPEG, GIF, TIF, BMP, PSD, SGI, and PNG pics on your iPod. On the Mac, JPEG and GIF files, along with images in the PICT, TIFF, BMP, PNG, JPEG 2000, SGI, and PSD formats work just fine. (If you have iPhoto 5 or later, you can also sync MPEG-4 videos over to your iPod Touch.)
There are a couple of other things to remember when you add images to your iPod. For one, you can’t import pictures from one of those photo CDs from the drugstore or from a backup disc you made yourself. Photos you store on DVDs or CDs won’t cut it, either. iTunes needs to pull photos directly from your hard drive. The solution in both cases? Transfer your pics from the disc to your computer so they’re ready for your iPod.
When it comes to photos, the iPod allies itself with just a single computer. That means that, unlike manual music management, where you can grab songs from several different computers, you can synchronize pictures between only one iPod and one computer. If you try to load photos from a different computer, iTunes replaces all your existing iPod photos with the pictures from that new machine. Ouch.
You also can’t dump photos directly into the iPod from your digital camera—you need to go through iTunes. (There used to be a handy gadget called the iPod Camera Connector that siphoned photos from your camera’s memory card to the iPod’s hard drive, but it doesn’t work on modern iPods, nor does Apple’s iPad Camera Connection Kit. One can only hope that a variation of this device comes out for the iPhone/iPod Touch one of these days…)
Get Pictures onto Your iPod
Okay, so you’ve got your screen-outfitted iPod and a bunch of pictures in an iTunes-friendly format on your hard drive. How do you get those photos from your drive to your iPod? The same way you transfer music—through iTunes.
First, you need to set your preferences in iTunes and on the iPod so they can sync the photos you want to carry around, like so:
Connect your iPod to your PC or Mac with the iPod’s USB cable.
Once the iPod shows up in the iTunes Source list, click its icon to select it.
Turn on the checkbox next to “Sync photos from” and then choose your photo program or photo-storage folder; that lets iTunes knows where to find your pics. You can copy over every pic or just the albums (sets of pictures) you select.
Click Sync (or Apply, if this is your first time syncing photos).
Tip
If you own a Touch and use the Places feature in iPhoto ’09 to embed GPS location data into your photos (also known as geotagging), you can see your pictures represented by pins on a map by tapping Photos→Places; tap a pin to see the pic.
If you don’t use a photo-management program and you just want to copy a folder of photos from your hard drive to your iPod, select “Choose folder” from the menu and then navigate to the desired folder. You can sync just the photos in your chosen folder, or include the photos tucked away in folders inside your chosen folder.
Select the “All photos and albums” option if you want iTunes to haul every single image in your photo program’s library (or folder) over to your iPod. If you don’t want to copy over those bachelorette-party snaps, opt for “Selected albums” and choose only the collections you want from your photo program. If you sync a folder, keep those party pics out of the folder.
If you use a Mac with iPhoto ’09 and take advantage of the program’s face-recognition feature, you can also sync photos according to who’s in the pictures. Just scroll down the photo-sync preferences page to the Faces area and turn on the checkboxes next to the names of your favorite people. You can sync iPhoto Events (typically, photos taken on the same day) here as well.
Whenever you connect your iPod to your computer, iTunes syncs the photo groups you designate, adding any new pictures you stored in these groups since you last connected. During the process, iTunes displays an “Optimizing photos…” message in its status window, like the one shown here:
Don’t let the term “optimizing” scare you: iTunes hasn’t taken it upon itself to touch up your photographic efforts. The program simply creates versions of your pictures that look good on anything from your tiny iPod screen to your big TV screen (in case you want to connect your iPod to it). Then it tucks all those copies away on your hard drive before adding them to your iPod.
Want to get certain albums or photos off your iPod? Reconnect it to iTunes, go back to the Photos tab, and deselect the albums you no longer want to sync. If you want to banish individual pictures, remove them from your desktop album and sync again.
Tip
Want to take a snap of some cool thing on your Touch’s screen? Hold down the Home button and press the Sleep/Wake button as though it were a camera shutter. The resulting screenshot lands in Photos→Saved Photos. You can transfer the pic back to your computer the next time you sync. In fact, if your computer has a photo-organizing program that senses when you connect a digital camera, it will likely leap up and offer to pull in the Touch’s shots, just as it would digicam photos.
View Photos on the iPod Touch
With its big color screen, the iPod Touch shows off your photos better than other iPods—and lets you have more fun viewing them because it’s literally a hands-on experience.
To see the pictures you synced from your computer, tap the Photos icon on the Home screen. Tap the buttons in the bottom row to see photos grouped by Albums, Faces, or Places. Tap an album title, name, or place to see thumbnails of those photos. To get back to your library, tap the Albums (or Faces or Places) button at the top left of the screen.
To see a full-screen version of a picture, tap its thumbnail image. The Touch displays photo controls for a few seconds; tap the photo to make them go away (tap it again to make them reappear). Double-tap a photo to magnify it. You can also rotate the Touch so that horizontal photos fill the width of the screen instead of being letterboxed.
Here are some other things you can do with your photos on the Touch:
Tap the left and right arrow keys to move through the photos in your collection.
Tap the triangle icon at the bottom of a full-frame photo to start a slideshow. Flip to the next page to learn about slideshow settings.
To set a photo as the wallpaper for your Touch (you know, that background picture you see onscreen when you wake the Touch from a nap), tap the
icon in the lower-left corner. Then tap the Use As Wallpaper button. This icon also calls up buttons that let you email photos over the Touch’s WiFi connection, send pictures to your MobileMe account (if you have one), and assign a photo to someone in your Touch contacts list.Spread and pinch your fingers onscreen (one of those fancy Touch moves described in Chapter 3) to zoom in and out of a photo. Drag your finger around the screen to pan through a zoomed-in photo.
Flick your finger horizontally across the screen in either direction to scroll through your pictures at whizzy speeds. You can show off your vacation photos really fast this way (your friends will thank you).
Tapping the icon with a single photo onscreen attaches that image to an email message; tapping the same icon from the thumbnails screen lets you attach multiple photos to a message. Tap the thumbnails of all the pics you want to send, address your email, type a note if you like, and then tap the Send button.
Tip
Want to use a certain photo for your Touch wallpaper, but wish you could get rid of that guy making faces in the background? You can “crop” photos using the ol’ spread, pinch, and drag moves. Once you like what you see, tap the icon in the bottom-left corner and then choose the Use As Wallpaper option.
View Photos on the iPod Nano or Classic
Once you get your photos freed from the confines of your computer and onto your Nano or Classic, you probably want to show them off. Here’s how:
iPod Nano. Tap the Photos icon on the Nano’s Home screen to call up a list of your photo albums, along with an All Photos option. Select an album and flick up or down to see all the thumbnails in it. Tap a thumbnail to see a pic full screen (well, as full screen as you can get on a 1.5-inch-square screen where your photos will be letterboxed unless you zoom in on them). Flick your finger on the screen from right to left to glide through the images. Double-tap a picture to zoom in and out of it; if you loaded Faces on your Nano through iPhoto ’09, the zoom centers on the face. To see more of a photo while you’re zoomed in, drag your finger on the screen to pull a different part of the picture to the center.
You can tap the screen once to call up the navigation controls, which give you a
button that starts an automatic slideshow, and 
and 
arrows so you can advance through your album at your own pace. The control bar also has a small square grid icon in the top-left corner; tap it to go back to your list of albums.iPod Classic. Choose Photos→All Photos (or select an album) from your Classic’s main menu to see a screen of thumbnail images. Use the scroll wheel to maneuver the little yellow highlight box, and then zoom along the rows until you get to the pic you want. If you have hundreds of pee-wee photos, tap the Previous and Next buttons to advance or retreat through the thumbnails by the screenful. Highlight a photo and press the center button to call up a large version of it.
Press the Previous and Next buttons—or scroll the click wheel—to move through pics one by one. Press Menu to return to the full album.
Digital Photographer Alert: Store Full-Quality Photos on Your iPod
When iTunes optimizes your photos for iPoddification, it streamlines the images a bit instead of transferring the big, full-resolution files. But if you want the high-res photos, you can copy them over to your Nano or Classic—good news if you’re an avid photographer and want to haul a big, print-ready photo collection from one machine to another. (But not so good news if you’re a Touch owner, because you can’t use your iPod as an external drive unless you get third-party software like TouchCopy, as mentioned in Chapter 5.)
Nano and Classic users can follow these steps:
Connect your Nano or Classic and select it in the iTunes Source list. Make sure you’ve set up your iPod as a portable hard drive (see The iPod as Portable Hard Drive for details). The short version: In your iPod’s Settings page in iTunes, click the Summary tab and then turn on the “Enable disk use” checkbox.
Click the Photos tab in the iTunes window.
Turn on the “Include full-resolution photos” checkbox.
After you sync, full-resolution copies of your photos sit happily in the Photos folder on your iPod’s hard drive. (The Photos folder also includes a subfolder called Thumbs that’s full of iPod-optimized images in special .ithmb format; you can safely ignore these.) Since your iPod is now pulling double duty as a flash drive, you just need to connect it to another computer, open its icon, and copy the full-res photos over to the second computer.
Play Slideshows on Your iPod
A photo slideshow takes all the click-and-tap work out of showcasing your pics, freeing you up to admire your pictures without distraction. To run a slideshow on an iPod, you need to set up a few things, like how long each photo appears onscreen and what music accompanies your trip to Disneyland.
Slideshow Settings on an iPod Touch or Nano
To customize the way photos slide by on your Touch screen, press the Home button and then tap Settings→Photos. The Nano has similar menu items, but in a different order. On either iPod, you have these options:
How long each picture stays onscreen. Tap the time shown to get a menu of choices, which includes 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds per shot.
The transition between photos. The Touch has the usual Hollywood-style dissolves, wipes, and ripples to choose from, while the Nano gives you a choice of animated effects, like the folding-paper Origami transition and the “Ken Burns” setting that slowly pans across a photo (a technique the eponymous documentary director popularized in his films).
You can also choose to have the iPod shuffle your photos, or repeat a slideshow when it ends, so that it loops until you manually stop it. If you want to have music in the background, start playing a song or a playlist in the Music area of the iPod before returning to the Photos menu. Then select the photo you want to start with and press the button to begin the slideshow.
Tip
If you wrangle your picture collection in iPhoto ’09 on the Mac, you can export your intricately crafted and scored iPhoto slideshows as little movies sized up just for the iPod—and put them right into iTunes. Select a slideshow in iPhoto and click the Export button. In the “Export your slideshow” box that appears, turn on the checkbox for Mobile or Medium (the preferred settings for iPod Touch and Classic viewing, respectively) and make sure you turn on the checkbox next to “Automatically send slideshow to iTunes”. Click the Export button. To actually complete the transfer, connect your iPod to your computer and then click the Movies tab on the iPod’s Preferences screen in iTunes. Select the slideshow and sync away.
Slideshow Settings on the iPod Classic
You set slideshow options on the Classic by choosing Photos→Settings. You’ll see a slew of options ready to shape your slideshow experience.
Use the Time Per Slide menu to set how much time (from 2 to 20 seconds) each photo stays onscreen. (During the slideshow, you can also go to the next image with a tap of the click wheel.)
Use the Music menu to pick a song from your iPod’s playlists to serve as the soundtrack for your show (assuming you want one). You may even want to create a playlist in iTunes to use with a particular slideshow.
As with music tracks, you can shuffle the order of your photos and repeat the slideshow. You can also add fancy transitions by choosing Photos→Settings→Transitions. You get to pick from several dramatic photo-changing styles, including effects that let you zoom out and fade to black.
To make sure your slideshow plays on your iPod’s screen, turn the TV Out setting to Off, which will direct the video signal to your iPod. (Turn the page if you want to project your slideshow on a TV.) Alternatively, you can select Ask, so that each time you start a slideshow, the iPod inquires whether you intend to display your photos on the big or small screen.
Once you get your settings just the way you want them, select the album or photo you want to begin with, and then press the Play/Pause button on the click wheel to start the show. Press the Play/Pause button during playback to temporarily stop the show, and press it again to continue.
The show’s time per slide, music, and transitions should all match the settings you chose. All you have to do now is sit back, relax, and enjoy your handiwork, not only in taking great photos, but in picking great slideshow effects as well.
Play Slideshows on Your TV
Flip back to the previous chapter if you need help connecting your iPod to a television set so you can see your digital goodies on the big screen (you need a special AV cable, for example). Once you make that iPod-TV link, you need to adjust a few more things on the iPod.
For the iPod Touch and 2010 Nano
Tap Settings→Video (Touch) or Settings→Photos (Nano). When you connect an AV cable to the Touch or Nano, your slideshow automatically appears on your TV instead of on your iPod. In the TV Out section of the Touch, you can toggle Widescreen On or Off.
For the TV Signal setting, select your local television broadcast standard. If you’re in North America or Japan, choose NTSC. If you’re in Europe or Australia, choose PAL.
Turn on your TV and select your iPod as the video source. You tell your TV to use the iPod as the input signal the same way you tell it to display the signal from a DVD player or a game console. Typically, you press the Input or Display button on your TV’s remote to change from the live TV signal to a new video source.
On the iPod, navigate to the album you want. Tap the photo you want to start with, and then tap the Play triangle at the bottom of the screen to begin your show.
For the iPod Classic and Video Nano
Choose Photos→Settings→TV Out→On. The On option tells your iPod to send the slideshow out to a TV screen instead of playing it on its own screen. (You can change your iPod’s Ask setting so that it always asks you which screen you want to use.) If you have a Classic or older Nano and use one of Apple’s AV cables, TV Out gets set to On automatically.
Select your local television broadcast standard. If you’re in North America or Japan, choose Photos→Settings→TV Signal→NTSC. If you’re in Europe or Australia, choose Photos→Settings→TV Signal→PAL. If you’re in an area not listed above, check your television’s manual to see what standard it uses or search the Web for “world television standards.”
Turn on your TV and select your iPod as the video source. You select the input for the iPod’s signal the same way you tell your TV to display a signal from a DVD player or game console. Typically, you press the Input or Display button on your TV’s remote to change from a live TV signal to a new video source.
Now, cue up a slideshow on the iPod and press the Play/Pause button. Your glorious photographs—scored to the sounds of your selected music, if you wish—appear on your television screen. (Because television screens are horizontal displays, vertical shots end up with black bars along the sides.)
Your pre-selected slideshow settings control the show, though you can advance through it manually with your thumb on the click wheel. If you have the iPod Universal Dock, you can also pop through shots with a click of its tiny white Apple remote control. Although just one photo appears at a time on the TV, if you’re driving the iPod Classic, your iPod displays not only the current picture, but the one before and the one after it as well, letting you narrate your show with professional smoothness: “OK, this is Shalimar before we got her fur shaved off after the syrup incident…and here she is later.”
Note
As explained in the previous chapter, the type of iPod you have dictates the equipment you need to display photos and videos on your TV. First-generation video iPods that came out between 2005 and 2006 can use the older iPod AV cable that connects through the headphone port or Line Out jack on an iPod dock. Newer Touches, Nanos, and Classics connect through the Apple Universal Dock, the Apple Composite AV Cable, the Apple Component AV Cable, or a compatible third-party offering. In any case, it’s going to cost you a few bucks.