Photos: Viewing Pictures
The Photos app display is shown in Figure below (left). If you're used to iPhoto, this display will look familiar, because it uses the same terms and structure. The Camera Roll includes all the images you've recently shot on your iPhone, and your Photo Library includes every image synchronized to your iPhone (see the "Synchronizing Pictures from Your Computer" section later in this article for details).
The Photos application lists all albums that you've synchronized to your iPhone, as well as the current roll you've been shooting on your camera. People who regularly use iPhoto may have a lot more albums than shown here. The number of buttons on the bottom toolbar varies depending on whether you choose to sync events and faces from iPhoto to your iPhone.
The Events and Faces buttons on the bottom toolbar appear or disappear depending on whether you've chosen to sync any Faces or Events groups from iPhoto to your iPhone. Events are photos that are grouped by a particular event or time (such as a vacation or a wedding), while Faces are collections of photos with a certain person's face in them.
The iPhone's geolocation features can tag each of your iPhone pictures with the location where they were taken. To do this, you must have location services enabled on your iPhone and must give the Camera app permission to tag the photos that it takes. Make sure that Settings → General → Location Services is turned on; then scroll down the list of apps shown on the Location Services settings screen, and make sure that the button next to Camera is set to On.
Tapping the Places button at the bottom of the Photos screen displays a map with a pin at each location where photos were taken. This iPhone had taken photos in Southampton, England, New York, and Denver, and tapping the pin shows not only how many photos were taken in that location but provides an arrow to tap to view the photos taken at that place.
Working with Photo Albums
Photo albums are collections. They contain groups of photos you've saved together on your personal computer or photos all shot at around the same time. It all depends on how you've organized your collection and how you've synchronized that collection to your iPhone.
Tap the name of any photo album to select and display it. As Figure shows, album screens display their photos as rows of thumbnails. These small versions of your photos are displayed four per line. To find a particular photo, scroll up and down the library. Flick longer libraries to move quickly through your collection.
From your photo album, you can view your images:
- Tap any image it to display it full-screen.
- Tap the Play button at the bottom to start a slide show.
- Tap Photo Albums to return to the albums list.
Each photo album screen contains image thumbnails tiled four across. Scroll this screen to see your entire album. Tap an image to open it, and then tap the Play button that appears at the bottom of the image to start playing a slide show.
Working with Slide Shows
As the name suggests, iPhone slide shows display the contents of a photo album one image after another. Slide shows display each slide for a set period of time. To get started with slide shows, go to your Home screen and navigate to Settings → Photos. This Settings screen allows you to specify exactly how you want your slide shows to display:
- Play Each Slide For: Here, you can set the slide duration. Your choices are 2 seconds, 3 seconds (the default, which works really well for most people), 5 seconds, 10 seconds (which starts to get boring fast), and 20 seconds.
- Transition: Give your slide show a visual style by specifying how the iPhone should replace each image with the next. In our opinion, it's best to stick with Dissolve, which softly fades one image into the next. Cube, Ripple, Wipe Across, and Wipe Down offer alternative transition styles. Of these four, Wipe Across and Wipe Down are the least annoying visually.
- Repeat: Set this to On to make your slide show loop.
- Shuffle: Show your pictures in a random order by switching Shuffle from Off to On. When disabled, your pictures display in album order.
TIP:
There's no "official" way to add music to your slide shows. If you like, just start some music playing in the iPod application, and then run your slide show. You cannot synchronize a track to your slide show or have your music start playing when the slide show begins.
To end a slide show, tap an image. This stops the slide show, places you in the fullscreen photo display, and displays controls to start up the slide show again.
Working with a Full-Screen Image
When viewing an image full-screen, the iPhone allows you to interact with that photo using a number of these gestures:
- Pinching allows you to zoom into and out of the photo.
- Double-tap to zoom into the photo. Double-tap again to zoom out.
- When your image is displayed at the normal zoomed-out size, flick to the left or right to move to the previous or next image in the album.
When zoomed into an image, dragging the photo pans across it.
TIP: If you start your zoomed-in drag at the very edge of an image and drag toward the center, you can actually see bits of the next image in the sequence until you release your finger. Then your image springs back to its original position.
- Tap any image once to bring up the image overlay. The image overlay allows you to navigate between images (the left and right arrows), delete the current image (garbage can), start a slide show (the Play button), or use your photo in some way (the rectangle with the arrow), as discussed in the next section.
- Flip your iPhone onto its side to have your photo reorient itself. If the photo was shot using landscape orientation, it fits itself to the wider view.
Tap any image to display this control overlay. If you do not use the controls, the overlay fades away after a few seconds. The garbage can appears only when viewing the Camera Roll.