iPhone: The Missing Manual

Syncing Photos (Computer→iPhone)

Why corner people with your wallet to look at your kid's baby pictures, when you can whip out your iPhone and dazzle them with a finger-tapping slideshow? iTunes can sync the photos from your hard drive onto the iPhone, too. If you use a compatible photo-management program, you can even select individual albums of images that you've already assembled on your computer. Your photo-filling options for the iPhone include:

• Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later for Windows.

• Photoshop Album 2.0 or later for Windows.

• iPhoto 4.0.3 or later on the Mac.

• Aperture, Apple's high-end program for photography pros with muscular Macs.

• Any folder of photos on your hard drive, like My Pictures (in Windows), Pictures (on the Mac), or any folder you like.

The common JPEG files generated by just about every digital camera work just fine for iPhone photos. The GIF and PNG files used by Web pages work, too.

Note

You can sync photos from only one computer. If you later attempt to snag some snaps from a second machine, iTunes warns you that you must first erase all the images that came from the original computer.

When you're ready to sync your photos, connect the iPhone, click the iPhone icon in the iTunes source list, and then click the Photos tab in the main part of the window. Turn on "Sync photos," and then indicate where you'd like to sync them from (Photoshop Elements, iPhoto, or whatever).

If you want only some of the albums from your photo-shoebox software, turn on their checkboxes. ...