Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV some iphone picture problems

I have an iphone running ios 4 and I'm revisiting an old problem with aperture. I have a folder full of pictures syncing and MOST of the pictures in the folder look like CRAP on my iphone. I can zoom them in but when they get to the resolution they are in aperture, they look like a 15k jpeg in quality. In one album, of the 12 pictures, only TWO are sharp.

I finally realized the two that were sharp were very large orginals. The other 10 in that album are all smaller. Now they're not that small, easily larger than the iphone's screen, but those are definitely the ones that look bad. Some of these images are 300x600 or so. The good ones are much larger, 900x1400 or so. Considering the iphone's small screen size this should NOT be happening.

My first problem is I can't get aperture to show me the original. Like you can in itunes, control click and show in finder. Where is that in Aperture? I can't get at the originals to inspect them in something I'm more familiar with like preview, and my .applibrary is massive and not sorted in a way I can go looking for anything in.

Secondly, how do I fix this problem? Most of those pictures look like they're out of focus. It's as though aperture drops the resolution on the picture by a fixed percentage when syncing, regardless of original image size, causing big images to still look good, but devastating smaller ones.

I'm looking at the folder "iPod Photo Cache" in the applibrary and all the .ithmb are 600-900k each, that can't possibly explain the butchery. (and I don't recognize the format of those files to troubleshoot them)

Also another question.... my iphone has "iphoto library" in it too. I told it I wanted to sync from aperture, not iphoto. why is it ALSO pulling in old clutter from iphoto? These are old pictures that have long since been removed from iphoto.

Third question... how do I get my iphone to show me the titles of the pictures? I see the titles of the albums but not the pictures?

EDIT: I have dug into ApertureData.xml and found one picture that's been butchered.




The first path picture is a WHOPPING 100 × 150 pixels (5k) and looks exactly like the crap on my iphone.
The second is 240 × 360 pixels, 33k.
Aperture claims the original is 200 × 300 (0.1 MP)

One that looks good on the iphone:



First is 213 × 320 pixels (14k)
Second is 240 × 360 pixels (32k)
aperture claims the original is 426 × 640 (0.3 MP)

So it appears the first is the thumb for the iphone, and the second is the thumb for aperture. It's interesting to see that the thumbs for aperture are a fixed size (240x360) and yet the thumbs for iphone appear to vary in size, and are much smaller for smaller original images.

Sooo... are we just crap out of luck? Is my only solution to upscale smaller images before uploading them into aperture? (laaaaaame)

I don't know if this is your problem or not, but I have a slight familial tremor and the resulting shake of the iPhone often results in in what appear to be good images on the iPhone but look really bad when imported into either iPhoto or Aperture. My solution has been the iPhone app ClearCam that automatically takes a series of images then chooses the clearest one to save. It has largely eliminated my problem.

Here are some pics to look at and you will see what i mean has nothing to do with the source image quality:

Nearly identical quality sent to iphone on this image:

YBSS aperture thumbnail

YBSS iphone image

Now look at what it does to the iphone with this slightly smaller image:

pileated aperture thumbnail

pileated iphone image

I resized this little second image that was sent to the iphone, to the same size as the YBSS image sent to the iphone, so you could compare it with the other image as seen on the phone:

pileated as seen on iphone vs YBSS as seen on iphone

The iphone actually smooths it out so it looks worse than what you're seeing here. And of course the whole idea of zooming in on it is a complete joke.

It's just amazing how much SMALLER of an image it sends to the iphone in the second one. Keep in mind it's trying to display that smaller picture at the same size on the iphone, so zoom it up a bit and see how much muddier it looks than the aperture thumbnail. It's doing that because the original image on the pileated is much smaller. (it's actually just a tad smaller than the aperture thumbnail - which aperture had to UPscale to generate) These are the same two images as mentioned in my previous post, drag and dropped directly out of my .aplibrary

There is a disturbing similarity between this and my previous issue of it trashing my finder icons in a very similar manner. In that case, if you start with a picture that's slightly below 128x128, say 126x126, finder DOWNscales the image to 64x64, and THEN creates the icons from that, including the 128x128 icon. The solution in that case was to UPscale the source images to at least 128x128 before attempting to make icons from them. Which is just STUPID to have to do. But I got nowhere on that when I talked with Apple, it was "operating as designed", (and therefore NOT a bug) and they didn't care to change their design requirements.

I don't use either Aperture or an iPhone, but this MacRumors Forum thread suggests that changing the preview size in the Aperture preferences to "No Limit" may help.

AWESOME, thank you very much!