ericellenberg

How The Times Have Changed

A short adventure in sharing photos.

1. Arrive at work and decide to take a few minutes to upload photos of M. Ward concert from last night.
2. How do I get the photos from my iPhone to my Windows laptop without a cable? Oh yeah, Photo Stream. Get the iCloud control panel thingy, turn on Photo Stream, bingo.
3. Download and install said control panel, log in and turn on Photo Stream.
4. Photos begin downloading. One by one they show up in the folder. All of them are upside-down. (15 minutes have passed.)
5. A quick Google search finds this to be common and that the culprit is likely Windows’ handling of EXIF data where silly things like orientation are recorded.
6. No problem, I’ve got Windows Live Photo Gallery, I can do rotate. Open said app for the first time. Look confused for about 45 seconds while my brain takes a lap around the ribbon and all its everything.
7. Select all the photos I want to upload using the little checkboxes in the top left corner of the photo, batch rotate them (hey that was easy), and select the Facebook button to share.
8. Screen 1: How much do I want my Facebook integrated with Windows Live? Deselect everything. Screen 2: Log in to Facebook. Click Allow. (Does anyone else feel a little uneasy every time they see this?)
9. Brilliant. “Service Unavailable”. That’s all it says. Something in Microsoft-land barfed while it talked to Facebook. (About 25 minutes have passed.)
10. Hey, you know what? The iPhoto app for iPhone. I’ll try actually using it for a change.
11. Launch App Store, search for it, install it.
12. Open the app, wait for it to update the photo library, open the camera roll. Wait a second. What is this Updating Photo Library thing actually doing? Can it not just read directly from the system’s photo library? I don’t know.
13. Fiddle around to discover that selecting multiple photos involves tapping Edit, then the gear, then Select Multiple…
14. Select 29 photos. That’s nice: it shows me the photo in the editing window when I select it.
15. Tap the share arrow button, then Facebook. Facebook app flies in and I tap “Okay” to give iPhoto permission. (Still feel uneasy at that screen. Try to forget about it when it switches back to iPhoto.)
16. Name the album, upload starts.
17. Five minutes later, upload finishes with an offer to look at the newly uploaded photos.
18. Total elapsed time: about 35 minutes. Around 25 on Windows with no success. Around 10 on iPhone with success.

I made an assumption: I thought I’d need the laptop to share a lot of photos easily. I was wrong. Even if the Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery Extraordinary Edition with Puppies and Kittens Application had successfully authenticated with Facebook and uploaded the photos, it still would have taken longer than sharing them from my iPhone. The iPhone with iPhoto was more than sufficient.

And the crazy thing is, I feel certain it’s only going to get better.