- A New iPod or No?
- Porting Pictures
- Viewing Pictures
- Slipping into a Slideshow
Porting Pictures
In one hand, you've got a passel of pictures; in the other, your iPod Photo. How do you marry the two? No shotgun necessary; just follow along.
iTunes Delivers
Just as iTunes delivers music to your iPod, so does it handle the transaction between the pictures stored on your Mac or Windows PC and the iPod Photo. Those without an iPod Photo attached to their computer won't see this added functionality as it makes itself known only when you've made that connection between computer and iPod.
With that in mind, make such a connection and whistle in admiration when you choose Preferences from the iTunes menu, click the iPod tab, and notice that a Photos tab has magically appeared within the resulting window. This tab is the key to moving pictures from your computer to the iPod. It works this way:
- Enable the Synchronize Photos From option. When you do, you'll see an alert that asks if you're really sure you want to enable photo support. If this is your first time adding photos to your iPod, you may wonder why Apple would question your desire to have the iPod perform the job for which you paid so dearly. iTunes does this to warn you that any photos currently on the iPod will be replaced. Although you have the option to synchronize music manually, you don't have the option to manage photos manually on the iPod; thus, you have to be more careful about accidentally erasing pictures when you plug your iPod Photo into another computer and that other computer replaces your photos with photos of its own.
- Choose a source of photos.
On a Macintosh, you'll see iPhoto listed in the Synchronize Photos From pop-up menu (
Figure 3.2
). On your Mac, you also have the option to choose images from the Pictures folder in your user folder or select any other folder you'd like. This works pretty much as you'd expect.
Figure 3.2 iPhoto as a photo source in the Mac version of iTunes 4.7.
Figure 3.3 Copying photos from select folders within a host folder.
Figure 3.4 Adobe Photoshop Album as picture source.
- Include full-resolution photos (or don't). Near the bottom of the Photos tab of the iPod Preferences window, you'll see the Include Full-Resolution Photos option, followed by this text: Copy full-resolution versions of your photos into the Photos folder on your iPod, which you can access after enabling disk use in the General tab. This is a useful hunk of text, in that it hints at where your full-resolution images are stored, but were room to allow, it might be even more useful if it continued with these words: Oh, and don't get your hopes up thinking that just because you've copied these full-resolution images to your iPod, you'll be able to view these exact images on your iPod or project them to a television. No, sir (or madam, as the case may be), this option is provided only as a convenient way to transfer your images to the iPod so that you can later attach it to a different computer and copy your pictures from here to there. I mean, heavens, the iPod Photo is a little miracle worker, but for the love of Steve, do you really expect it to decipher images of heaven-knows-how-many-resolutions and convert them to a form compatible with your el-cheapo boob tube? Cut us some slack. We here at Apple are pretty smart, but we can't walk on water.
- Click OK. If the iPod's photo library is linked to the computer it's currently attached to, clicking OK tells iTunes to convert your photos and load them onto the iPod. If the iPod has a photo library loaded from a different computer, you'll once again see the "Are you sure?" dialog box, warning you that the pictures currently stored on the iPod will be vaporized and replaced with the photos on the attached computer. Click Yes, and the iPod will be updated.