Digital Photography Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 77 Transfer Images Via Email

Wireless photo transfer is one of the great
advantages of camera phones. These tips will have you filling up your
friends' phone mailboxes in short order.

Email might be the simplest way to get a photograph from your
phone to somewhere else. It
doesn't require a special cable, computer
peripheral, or additional software. Only a few camera phones (mostly
in the
Smartphone
category) allow additional file storage using MMC or SD cards. This
means that if your phone has limited storage space or if you have
installed a number of aftermarket applications that have their own
data requirements, you'll fill up the
phone's internal storage with just a few photos.
Emailing your photo might be the only way to free up storage space on
your phone if you do not have ready access to a desktop, notebook, or
PDA to which you can offload the phone's photo
files.

To make sure you do not incur any unexpected extra cost, you should
check your mobile phone's service plan before
transferring photos via email. Most mobile-phone service providers
have a set of email and data services to choose from. If you plan on
emailing photo files frequently from your camera phone, I recommend
choosing an unlimited email or data plan. Generally, these plans are
reasonably priced.

After you confirm that you can send photo files using email on your
camera phone, the next step is to add email addresses to your
phone's contacts list. You can create and edit
contacts by using the phone's keypad. However, you
might find it faster and easier to create the contact entries on your
notebook or desktop PC and then synchronize the list with your camera
phone.

Most camera phones come bundled with software
to synchronize data with a Microsoft Windows system. If you use Mac
OS X, check whether Apple iSync
(http://www.apple.com/isync/)
will allow you to synchronize your computer's
address book with your camera phone. Linux
users should investigate Wammu-Gammu GUI (http://www.cihar.com/gammu/wammu/) to see if
it meets their needs.

Once you have laid the groundwork, sending a photo in email from a
camera phone is easy. On my Nokia 3650, I start by choosing
SendVia Multimedia, as shown in Figure 7-7. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)
is an extension of the text-only Short Messaging Service (SMS),
which allows text, sound, images, and video messages to be sent
between MMS-capable phones. However, these messages can also be sent
through conventional email if the operator of the mobile phone
provides this service.

Figure 7-7. Sending a photo using Multimedia Messaging

The email address in Figure 7-8 was selected from
my phone's contacts list. As mentioned earlier, this
process is much more fun if you have the addresses of friends and
family in the phone. The text name associated with the email address
is shown in the To: field. The subject is out of view in this screen.

Figure 7-8. Image ready to send

If you're not careful, it's easy to
fill up someone else's email box (or your own) with
camera-phone photos. For example, when set to its Fine image setting,
the Nokia 3650 creates JPEG files that range in size from 50 to 80 KB
for 640 480 (0.33-megapixel) images. Emailing 40 to 50 of these image
files will fill up a mailbox with a three-megabyte limit (typical for
some free mail services). File size will become even more of an issue
as one- and two-megapixel camera phones become more common and file
sizes increase geometrically.

Todd Ogasawara