Everyone
I need some help from those of you who love your iPhones. In the last two days I have had two people submit photos to me from their iPhones. In both cases the pictures have been reduced to an unusable resolution of only 640 pixels across. In one case we had a call and discovered that sending the photo off the iPhone through WhatsApp got the resolution up to 1024 pixels across but looking at the photo details on the phone it was 4032 pixels across.
iPhones have a "reduce attachment size" option in Settings|Messages but it appears to make no difference.
Do any of you know how to reliably send full sized pictures directly from an iPhone?
Stuart
P.S. I see there is a WeTransfer App so I will explore that in the short term.
I always ask for phone photos to be sent as an attachment to an email when I want full size. I believe the iPhone mail app allows you to specify a resolution when attaching the photo. WhatsApp (whether iPhone or Android) seems to always reduce the size of any photos, although there is a setting (on Android) under "Storage and data" called "Photo upload quality" which can be set to "Best quality". The default is "Auto".
I have an iPhone (admittedly a rather elderly one) and if I email a photo (from the photos app) it asks what size to send it as. Sizes offered are small, medium, large and actual size. Picking a random photo the actual size offered is 2.6 MB.
Frank
It is strange how much things have changed.
I can recall that I had several 009 News front cover photos that were taken on a 1.3mp 1280x1024 res camera and they looked just fine on the cover.
But I guess time has moved on.
Quote from: B.Meldon on January 26, 2023, 09:28
It is strange how much things have changed.
You're not alone Brian! I don't have an iPhone so a lot of the commentary in this thread is not my concern, however, as Brian has stated, the image resolution that used to be perfectly OK for even cover photos is not now, and according to Stuart's article in the current 009 News issue, even acceptable for one of the small images that appears in the 2 column "standard" layout in the body text of the News.
It has been explained to me that the minimum resolution that Stuart can accept for images to be published at various sizes is to do with the process that the current printer that the Society uses requires, but that does not fully explain why, and certainly since the Society took on producing the News in a professional desk top publishing package (InDesign, I assume this is still what is used?) that the requirement for higher and higher resolution images has increased out of all reasonable proportion.
We don't all have iPhones or any other "smart" phone devices for that matter and the fact that an iPhone or an Android powered phone is capable of churning out an image at over 4000 pixels wide (and at a vast resulting size of image at well over 4Mb - up to 20Mb if you have a camera of any sort that will take a photo at "highest" quality - which means minimum compression and therefore as close to traditional film as possible).
I believe I am qualified to at least voice an opinion on this subject as a check on the archives shows that since my first digital image was published on the cover of the News in Vol 30/1 September 2002 and up to the last time one of mine made it to the cover in Vol 46/9 March 2019 via the blue pencils of 6 previous editors, I have had 69 cover photos published - some 35% of the total. Interestingly my first several cover photos were similar to the resolution Brian has quoted - mine were 1600 x 1200 pixels.
The highest resolution I have used since 2012 using a Fuji HS30EXR camera and the one that all my images submitted for the News are at (before any editing or cropping is done) is 3264 x 2448 which requires between 2 and 2.4Mb size per image. I can just about cope with that as storage requirements of the originals on my SD cards and hard drive. If anyone thinks that putting all their storage eggs into one online "cloud" type basket is the way to go, then I'm sure the Chinese and Russians will be delighted when they step up the cyber war they have already been tinkering with!
If you refer to what is probably the best ever 009 News, the special Vol 41/2 Nov 2013 issue covering the fantastic Society 40th anniversary weekend at Kegworth in 2013 produced by Steve Fulljames and Tom Dauben, I proudly made it to a double page centre spread (ie A3 size) with one of my photos - which was 3264 x 2448 pixels and would only just make it to a 7 x 5 inch half page sized image on an inside page according to the size requirements stated in the current Vol50/5 Feb 23 issue page 17.
I have to accept that my regular appearances (up until 2019 anyway) on the cover is now history and hand the honour over to all you iPhone/Android phone photographers (don't forget that they don't have rotating viewfinders so if you want to get anything that is not an aerial photo you have to bend over and get down yourself to rail level, and that close ups with the tiny lens will also often create image distortion - good luck, happy snapping and don't be shy of sending your images in or Stuart won't have anything to put in the News!!
Mick
Just to note that I have just checked my files and one rather old digital photo that is in my Jouef artical that was in the January 2019 009 News at half page width was only 584 X 364 and that looks ok on the page.
Grrr, I just spent 30 minutes writing a response and the forum logged me out instead of posting it. I do not have the mojo to retype it today...
Does any one know how to solve the iPhones issue or should iPhones be consigned to the dustbin.
Disgruntled of Reading
Quote from: Stuart Taylor on January 26, 2023, 18:20
Grrr, I just spent 30 minutes writing a response and the forum logged me out instead of posting it. I do not have the mojo to retype it today...
That has happened to me. But only once.
I type long posts in word now and copy and paste them to the forum.
Mojo restored through use of G&T.
I knew this thread would go off track fairly quickly ;D ;D ;D
Let me respond to the points above:
- I don't have any knowledge of historical resolutions for printing or any knowledge of printing technologies, but we all know how our personal printers have improved in recent years. What I do know is that the printer lists their preferred resolution as 300dpi for how they print 009 News currently. I have done the maths and come up with what is required and then had to add a percentage on for cropping. Those are the numbers used in the article.
- Myself and Mick exchanged emails about a year ago on this subject. I had the printers run off some sheets where his usual resolution picture was in one column and the other column was the resolution he now uses for me. There was a difference. It wasn't huge, but it was there. My view is that my role is to produce the best magazine I can to showcase the members work so I prefer the better resolution.
- There are two types of photographers. There are the mere mortals like me and then there are the photographic Gods like Mick. I love receiving Mick's pictures. They are in focus, great composition, colour balanced and I never have to touch them. With mere mortals like myself, I have to find nice ways to ask that the picture is taken again with the subject matter in focus. I will usually have to crop the picture to either centre the subject or to remove acres of cutting mat. The simple truth is that I need higher resolution pictures from mere mortals than I do from photographer Gods and the article I wrote applies mainly to mere mortals, especially mere mortals using phone cameras. I shoudl add that it is a requirement to take the phot from further back to get more in focus with phone cameras so I am happy to do the cropping!
- I don't believe Mick's days as a cover boy are over ;) ;) I know that if I want to use one of his pictures on the front of the News, I only have to ask for the original size and it will be fine!
Now back to why iPhones are so frustrating. One thing I have learnt in the last couple of days is that WeTransfer has an app you can download for Android and Apple so that may be the "Get our of jail free" card.
Stuart
As I said before, whenever I need a full-sized image from an iPhone I ask for it to be sent by email. That always works, although I guess the person doing the sending might need to know how you ensure the attachment is indeed full size.
I suspect the issue is that Apple (and others?) are trying to be too helpful by automatically sending the smallest file size - after all your only going to be sharing 'snaps' of somebody pratfalling you your mates, aren't you? - to save on mobile data / deal with poor reception by default.
There must be a way to change this, but as an iPhone user I've no idea, as I download to the iMac and send them to Stuart from there (often using WeTransfer) rathere than direct from the iPhone...