Sigh, I just realized that the iPhone photo viewer does not even allow you to save/display high-resolution versions of photos you want to bring with you. That's fine for “pretty pictures” that you don't need to see detail on to appreciate (e.g. like those from my fall-foliage photo stream), but that makes the iPhone worthless for showing most daily snapshots, such as those from Anthony's kindergarten sports festival. The first thing a parent wants to do is zoom up to see the kid's smile, and on the iPhone all you see is the 640 × 480 image blown up with heavy pixilization.
Worthless.
Sigh.
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I agree, its annoying, and the iTunes “optimisaion” during copy to the iPhone seems to reduce the number of colours too.
While Apple should do it with the native app, there are alternatives. I have been using Air Sharing, which allows you to transfer any file from your Mac/PC over wifi to your iphone (pdf, jpg, text documents, word, excel, iwork files, web pages). Then you can disconnect from your computer, and Air Sharing will display the files.
See Air Sharing at: http://www.avatron.com/products/
Note that with a jpeg with a resolution of 1920 x 1280 takes about 5 seconds to render, so moving picture to picture takes a little patience. The good thing is that pinch zooming and pan works, so you can see the zoom detail of your photos.
There are other alternatives too, I think File Magnet will do this too.
Hope this helps.
Oops, due to a mistake on my part (where “mistake” is a euphemism for “senility”) this comment was stuck in moderation for 10 days. Sorry! —Jeffrey
The application called “AirSharing” does what you want. The jpg files viewed by this app are the full-size jpg’s you load onto your phone. Double-click on a photo and it zooms to the 1:1 crop centered at the spot you touched. Pinch and swipe to navigate around the photo.
Plus: add photos to your phone over the wifi network via webdav. No tethering required. Very convenient. Create arbitrary nested folder structure for organizing your photos.
Minus: a very large jpg file takes several seconds to load. This might be one reason that itunes resizes your jpg’s to a small size when syncing them to the built-in photo app.
Minus: the files added through air sharing are not visible to the built-in photo app because apps are not allowed to share data with each other.
I’ve had AirSharing from day one, and yeah, it does allow you to at least see the detail, but a true photo app would cache different sized versions for quick display. Since Apple disallows third-party apps that it feels conflicts with its own, I’m sure we’ll never see what a real photo app can look like on this platform )-: —Jeffrey
I’m positive I already posted about Air Sharing below this blog entry about a week ago. Very odd, maybe I didn’t press the “Submit” button.
Anyway Jeff has said roughly the same thing I did. About 5 seconds to render a 1920 x 1280 pixel (approx 1 MB) image.
There are other similar apps too like File Magnet, and more recently (and free) Discover WiFi.
[pressing Submit NOW]
Your problem the first time was not pressing the “Yo! Friedl, Wake up” button. (Sorry) —Jeffrey
Thanks Jeffrey, glad I’m not going crazy!
Anyway, using the iPhone with a tiny screen for viewing DSLR photos will never be ideal – when Apple finally release a touchscreen netbook, then lets hope they have a proper, native, photo viewing app on it.