Chapter 9
In This Chapter
Shooting pictures
Importing your pictures
Viewing and admiring pictures
Creating a slideshow
Working with pictures even more
Deleting your photos
Hamming it up in Photo Booth
Throughout this book, we sing the praises of the iPad’s vibrant multitouch display. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more appealing portable screen for watching movies or playing games. As you might imagine, the iPad you have recently purchased (or are lusting after) is also a spectacular photo viewer. Images are crisp and vivid, at least those that you shot properly. (C’mon, we know Ansel Adams is a distant cousin.)
What’s more, you can shoot some of those pictures directly with your prized tablet. The reasons, of course, are the front and rear cameras built into the device. If you read Chapter 8, you already know you can put those cameras to work capturing video. In this chapter, you get the big picture on shooting still images.
Okay, we need to get a couple of things out of the way: The iPad may never be the most comfortable substitute for a point-and-shoot digital camera, much less a pricey digital SLR. As critics, we can quibble about the fact that no flash is included. And shooting can be awkward.
But we’re here, friends, to focus on the positive. And having cameras on your iPad may prove to be a godsend when no better option is available. With the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, Apple has jazzed up the cameras to something splendid. For that matter, the cameras through the most recent iterations of the iPad generally have become pretty good. In Chapter 8, we tell you about the capability to capture full high-definition video up to what techies refer to as the 1080p standard.
In this chapter, we point out other optical enhancements in the most recent iPads. The iPad Air, which was the top-of-the-line model when we wrote this book, has an 8-megapixel iSight camera with backside illumination, an ƒ/2.4 aperture, and a five-element lens. Among other features, it has a hybrid infrared filter like what you’d find on an SLR, that helps lead to more uniform colors. Oh, and face detection makes sure the balance and focus are just right for up to ten faces on the screen.
All these features are photographer-speak for potentially snapping darn sweet pictures.
And we can think of certain circumstances — selling real estate, say, or shopping for a new home — where tablet cameras are quite convenient.
Apple has also made finding the pictures in your stash an easier task, too, with an organizational structure in iOS 7 and iOS 8 that arranges photos in the Photos app by collections, moments, and years.
Meanwhile, you’re in for a real treat if you’re new to Photo Booth, a yuk-it-up Mac program that is also on the iPad. That may be the best, or at least the most fun, use of the cameras yet.
We get to Photo Booth at the end of this chapter. But over the next few pages, you discover the best ways to make the digital photos on the iPad come alive, no matter how they managed to arrive on your machine.
You can start shooting pictures on the iPad in a few ways. So we’re going to cut to the chase immediately:
However you get here, your iPad has turned into the tablet equivalent of a Kodak Instamatic, minus the film, of course, and in a form factor that is obviously much bigger. You’re now effectively peering through one of the largest viewfinders imaginable in the near-10-inch display on full-size iPad models. And yeah, the near-8-inch screen on the iPad mini provides a pretty sweet viewfinder as well.
If you’re using a version of iOS prior to iOS 7 with your iPad, make sure the switch at the bottom-right corner of the screen is set to camera mode rather than video mode.
We marvel at the display throughout this book; the Camera app gives us another reason to do so.
You move from one format to another by swiping up or down along the right edge of the screen so that the format you’ve chosen is highlighted in yellow, with a yellow dot next to it.
The image you shoot lands in the Camera Roll album, in the lower-right corner of the screen. We explain what you can do with the images on the iPad later in this chapter.
Here are some tips for working with the Camera app:
Next to the focus box is a sun icon. When that sunny exposure icon is visible, drag your finger up or down against the screen to increase or decrease the brightness in a scene. And you can lighten or darken scenes for both still photos and video.
The iPad has a 5X digital zoom, which basically crops and resizes an image. Such zooms are nowhere near as effective quality-wise as optical zooms on many digital cameras. Be aware that zooming works only with the rear camera still in camera mode; it doesn’t work with the front camera or when you shoot video.
The front camera is of lower quality than its rear cousin. In the Air 2, however, the front camera is improved and more than adequate for the kinds of demands you put on it, including FaceTime and Photo Booth. You can say the same for older iPads.
To get going, drag the screen so that Pano becomes your shooting mode of choice. The word Pano will be in yellow, just to the right of the yellow dot and below the camera button. Position the phone so it’s at the starting point and tap the camera button when you’re ready. Slowly and steadily pan in the direction of the arrow. (Tap the arrow if you prefer panning in the opposite direction.) Try to keep the arrow just above the yellow horizontal line. When the task is complete, you can admire your handiwork.
Think long and hard before permitting images to be geotagged if you plan on sharing those images with people from whom you want to keep your address and other locations private — especially if you plan on sharing the photos online.
Tap the timer icon (labeled in Figure 9-1) and choose 3 seconds or 10 seconds as the time interval between when you press the camera button and when the picture is captured. You’ll see a countdown on the screen leading up to that moment, and then the iPad will capture a burst of ten images. (You can keep all ten photos, none, or a number in between.) To turn off the self-timer, tap the Off button. Couldn’t be easier than that.
Of course, you’re not always going to use your iPad to take pictures. Fortunately, you can add pictures to your prized tablet in several other ways. Alas, one of these methods involves buying an accessory. We zoom in in the following sections.
We devote an entire chapter (see Chapter 3) to synchronizing data with the iPad, so we don’t dwell on it here. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it in this chapter. (The assumption in this section is that you already know how to get pictures onto your computer.)
When the iPad is connected to your computer, click the Photos tab on the iPad Device page in iTunes on the Mac or PC. Then select a source from the Sync Photos From pop-up menu.
Almost all the digital cameras we’re aware of come with a USB cable that you can use to transfer images to a computer. Of course, the iPad isn’t a regular computer, and it isn’t equipped with a USB port, nor does it have a memory card slot.
Instead, Apple sells an optional $29 iPad camera connection kit for the iPad 2 and the third-generation iPad, and separate ($29 each) Lightning–to–USB camera adapter and Lightning–to–SD card camera reader cables for more recent iPad models. These solutions work as follows:
Two small connectors are included in the camera connection kit, and each fits into the iPad’s dock connector at the bottom of the machine. One connector has a USB port; the other, an SD slot. If you have a fourth-generation iPad or later, use the Lightning–to–USB camera adapter for your camera and the Lightning–to–SD card camera reader to work with the card.
If you’re going the USB route, kindly use the cable that comes with your camera because no such cable comes with Apple’s kit.
Consult the manual that came with the camera if you’re unsure which setting to use.
The Photos app on the iPad opens and displays the pictures that you can import from the camera.
A check mark appears next to each image you select. And that’s pretty much it: The iPad organizes the pictures into albums and such, as we describe later in this chapter.
At this point, you’re free to erase the pictures from your camera.
The SD card reader connector accommodates the SD memory cards common to so many digital camera models. The procedure works almost identically to the USB connector, except that you’re inserting the SD gizmo into the dock or Lightning connector port rather than the USB connector mentioned previously. Just be careful to insert the SD gently to prevent any damage.
You can save many of the pictures that arrive in emails or pictures that you come across on the web easily: Just press and hold down your finger against the image, and then tap Save Image when the menu pops up a second later. Pictures are stored in the Camera Roll album we get to shortly. You can also tap Copy to paste said image into another app on your device.
So where exactly do your pictures live on the iPad? We just gave some of the answer away; the images you snap on the device first land in a photo album appropriately dubbed Camera Roll.
In the Photos or Camera app — you can get to the former by tapping a thumbnail image in the latter — you’ll also find pictures you’ve shared with friends and they’ve shared with you through the iCloud photo-sharing feature. The photos you imported are readily available too and are grouped in the same albums they were in on the computer.
You can still download to the iPad images that you want available when you’re not connected to cyberspace.
In this section, we show you not only where to find these pictures but also how to display them and share them with others — and how to dispose of the duds that don’t measure up to your lofty photographic standards.
Get ready to literally get your fingers on the pics (without having to worry about smudging them). Open the Photos app by tapping its icon on the Home screen or by going through the Camera app. Then take a gander at the trio of buttons at the bottom of the screen: Photos, Shared, Albums, as shown in Figure 9-2. We take these on one by one.
Tapping Albums lists all the albums you have on your iPad, with your camera roll (refer to Figure 9-2) at the upper left. Apple has kindly supplied additional premade albums: Panoramas, for all the panoramic scenes you’ve captured, Bursts for, well, your burst pictures, Videos (shooting videos is described in Chapter 8), and Recently Deleted, to give you a chance to recover any images that were accidentally given the heave-ho. Apple also displays the number of days before those pictures are permanently gone.
Albums that were synced from your Mac carry the From My Mac tag. These include the Events album and the Faces album, which used to have dedicated buttons in iOS, but no more. Another album that used to have its own dedicated button is Places.
Tap an album listing to open it. When you do, you see the minimalistic interface shown in Figure 9-3, which reveals the by-now-familiar Camera Roll album.
Browse the thumbnails until you find the picture or video you want, and then tap it. We soon show you all the cool things you can do from there.
Meanwhile, you can tell whether a photo is part of a burst binge in a couple ways. The first way is exposed here in the camera roll. The thumbnail that represents this sequence of shots will appear as though it’s sitting on a stack of photos. (You’ll see this thumbnail stack also when you come to collections view in the Photos app; we describe collections shortly.) Tap the thumbnail now. In the second way, the word Burst appears in the upper left of an image you’ve opened, with a numerical count of burst photos in parentheses.
If you can’t locate the thumbnail for a photo you have in mind, flick up or down to scroll through the pictures rapidly, or use a slower dragging motion to pore through the images more deliberately. We’re certain you’ll find the one you’re looking for soon enough.
To return to the list of albums, tap Albums at the upper-left corner of the screen. After backing out, you can create an album from the albums view by tapping the + in the upper-left corner (refer to Figure 9-2), typing a name for the album, and tapping Save. To select pictures (or videos) to add to your newly minted album, tap their thumbnails.
Shortly, we show you how to add pictures to an existing album.
Placing pictures into photo albums seems to us like it’s been the way of the world forever. But albums per se are not the only organizing structure that makes sense. As part of iOS 7, Apple cooked up a simple but ingenious interface for presenting pictures that is essentially a timeline of pictures, grouped by years, collections, and moments. iOS 8 follows the same path.
Pictures categorized by years are indeed all the pictures taken in a given year. Can’t be more straightforward than that.
The collections category is a subset within a year, such as your holiday pictures in Las Vegas. Within that grouping is another subset called moments — the pictures, say, that you took by the dancing fountains at the Bellagio Hotel.
Figure 9-4 shows side-by-side-by-side views of these groupings, which appear as a grid of Lilliputian thumbnails in the case of years — you can barely make out any of the pictures.
Tap the years view (Figure 9-4, left), and slightly bigger thumbnails appear as part of the collections view (Figure 9-4, center). Tap again, and the thumbnails get just a little bit bigger in the moments view (Figure 9-4, right).
Through all these views, you’ll see location information headings that get a tad more specific as you move from years to collections to moments, assuming your iPad knows where the pictures were taken. (Location Services must be turned on under Privacy Settings for your iPad to know where these images were captured.) If you tap a place location, Apple will fire up a map and show you how many pictures were taken in that location, as revealed in Figure 9-5.
To quickly skim all the pictures in the years view, press and drag your finger across the grid — as you do so, the thumbnails swell in size, one by one. Lift your finger and that last thumbnail takes over a chunk of the screen, ready for you to admire it, edit it, or share it.
You can also tap a thumbnail in moments view to see controls for editing the picture (upper right), sharing it (bottom left), or discarding it (bottom right), as shown in Figure 9-6. Tap again and those picture controls disappear and the picture is bordered on the top and bottom by black bars.
You’ve seen how pictures on the iPad can be organized into albums, years, collections, and moments. The iPad also supports the nifty faces and events features, which are familiar to Mac owners who use iPhoto software. Faces and events that show up in your list of albums are accompanied by the words From My Mac.
Consult Chapter 3 on syncing for a refresher on getting data to and from a computer to your iPad and back, a process that is even simpler through iCloud. When the iPad is connected to a Mac, you can sync photo events (pictures taken around birthdays, anniversaries, and so on) or faces (all the shots taken with a particular person in them). In Figure 9-7, all the pictures have Ed’s mug in them.
The faces feature requires that you sync to the iPhone with iPhoto or Aperture on a Mac.
Apple has kindly grouped some of your pictures into potentially helpful search categories: Nearby, Home, those taken from a specific time period or location, and Favorites, which are so designated each time you tap the heart icon above a chosen image. You can also consult a Recent Searches grouping. Or just type a search term with the on-screen keyboard, perhaps the date or the time a photo was taken or the location where it was shot.
Apple in its infinite wisdom recognizes that you might want to share your best images with friends and family and have those pictures automatically appear on those people’s devices.
An impressive and aptly named solution called shared photo streams arrived on the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone with iOS 6 (and a bit earlier on Macs running OS X Mountain Lion). It was modified in iOS 7 and is now referred to as iCloud photo sharing. The feature enables you to share pictures and videos with other folks and lets you in kind receive photo streams that other people make available to you. Here’s how:
The name is your call, but we recommend something descriptive, along the lines of My Trip to Paris (and you should be so lucky).
You can type a phone number, a text address, or an email address, or choose one of your contacts by tapping the + in a circle in the To field of the iCloud pop-up window.
The recipient will receive an email similar to the one in Figure 9-9 and can choose to subscribe to your shared album by tapping the button shown.
You can share photos and videos with pretty much anyone who has online access — people don’t need to join iCloud. If you want to share your pictures with everyone, you can do so through a public gallery on iCloud.com. To do that, tap the Shared icon at the bottom of the Photos app and then tap the iCloud pictures in question. This time, tap People near the upper-right corner of the screen, and then flip the Public Website switch to on (green).
If the people with whom you’re sharing have their own iCloud accounts and have iOS 6 or later on a device or are using a Macintosh computer running OS X Mountain Lion, Mavericks, or Yosemite, they can not only glom onto your stream to view your photos but also leave comments about them. Don’t worry — you have the power to remove snarky remarks.
If the people you’re sharing with have iOS 7 or iOS 8, they can add their own photos and videos to the stream, provided doing so is okay with you. If it is, turn on the Subscribers Can Post switch. At your discretion, you can also receive notifications when your subscribers weigh in with a comment or add their own pictures or videos to the shared stream. After tapping the People tab, you can invite more people to view your stream.
If you’re ultimately unhappy with the shared stream itself or the people with whom you’re sharing it, you can kill the shared stream or kick those people off the list. To kill the stream, select it, tap the Edit button, and tap the circled X that appears on the thumbnail image that represents the given stream. To remove a subscriber, tap the stream, tap People, and then tap the name of the person with whom you’re sharing the stream. Scroll down to the bottom and tap Remove Subscriber. You’ll be asked to tap a Remove button just to make sure or tap Cancel if you have second thoughts. If you do remove a subscriber, you can always re-invite the person later.
Photographs are meant to be seen, of course, not buried in the digital equivalent of a shoebox. The iPad affords you some neat ways to manipulate, view, and share your best photos.
You’ve already found out how to find individual pictures in albums, via iCloud, and in years, collections, and moments groupings. You may already know (from previous sections in this chapter) how to display picture controls. But you can do a lot of maneuvering of your pictures without summoning those controls. Here are some options:
Those of us who store a lot of photographs on computers are familiar with running slideshows of those images. It’s a breeze to replicate the experience on the iPad:
To do so, tap the Photos icon from the Home screen or tap the Recently Added button in the Camera app.
To cherry-pick the pictures you want to include in the slideshow, tap Select and then tap each image you want to include so that a check mark appears. Under this scenario, tap Add To and then add the chosen images to a new or an existing album. When that album is readily loaded, skip to the next step.
You’re taken to the Slideshow Options screen.
You have six transitions choices (cube, dissolve, origami, ripple, wipe across, wipe down). Why not try them all, to see what you like? You can choose the music from your iTunes stash.
You can view the slideshow on the iPad itself or have it beamed wirelessly to an Apple TV, should you own Apple’s $99 set-top box.
The slideshow ends automatically, unless you’ve set it to repeat, as explained in the next section. Tap the screen to end it prematurely.
That’s it! Enjoy the show.
You can alter the length of time each slide is shown, change the transition effects between pictures, and display images in random order.
From the Home screen, tap Settings and then scroll down and tap Photos & Camera. Then tap any of the following to make changes:
Press the Home button to leave the settings and return to the Home screen.
As mentioned, through the iCloud service, any photo you take with the iPad or with another iOS 8 device can be automatically stored in the cloud and pushed to another iPad, or your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, or Apple TV (third generation or later). The transfer is the antidote to the endless problem, “I’ve snapped a picture, now what?” Pictures are uploaded when your iCloud devices are connected to Wi-Fi.
What’s more, you need no longer fret about storage space when using iCloud photo library, which was still in beta, or test mode, as this book was being published. Apple used to store the last 1,000 pictures you took over a 30-day period in a special album — enough time, Apple figured, for all your devices to connect and grab those images, because a Wi-Fi connection was your only requirement. All the pictures you took remained on your PC or Mac, because those machines had more capacious storage. Thanks to iCloud photo library, the 1,000-picture limit on iOS devices no longer applies. Again, you can always manually move images from the shared album into other albums on your iPad or other iOS devices and computers, should you want to view those pictures when you don’t have an Internet connection.
Photos taken on the iPad aren’t whisked to iCloud until you leave the Camera app. In that way, you get a chance to delete pictures that you’d rather not have turn up everywhere. But after you leave the Camera app, all the photos there are saved in the Camera Roll album (in the list of Albums in the Photos app), including pictures that arrived as email attachments that you saved as well as screen captures taken on the iPad. We found this last feature handy when writing this book.
You can save pictures in the Camera Roll album to any other album on the tablet. Start by tapping the Select button at the upper-right corner of the screen. Next, tap each photo you want to move. Tap the Add To button that shows up at the top of the screen and choose the new album destination for your chosen images.
The iPad is never going to serve as a substitute for a high-end photo-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop. But you can dramatically (and simply) apply touch-ups and alter the composition of your pictures right from the Photos app. And Apple refined the editing process in iOS 8.
To start, choose an image and tap Edit. You’ll see the Edit Photo screen, as Figure 9-11, left, reveals.
The screen sports the following icons, from left to right:
Apple now allows third-party app makers to make their own filters and editing tools readily accessible from the Photos app.
Okay, so we told a tiny fib by intimating that photographs are meant to be seen. We should have amended that statement by saying that some pictures are meant to be seen. Others, you can’t get rid of fast enough. Fortunately, the iPad makes it a cinch to bury the evidence:
In an instant, the photo is mercifully disposed of. It’s also deleted from Photo Stream across all your devices.
Here’s a rundown of each choice:
You can also assign a photo to a contact by starting out in Contacts. To change the picture you assigned to a person, tap his or her name in the contacts list, tap Edit, and then tap the person’s thumbnail picture, which also carries the label Edit. From there, you can take another photo with the iPad’s digital camera, select another photo from one of your albums, edit the photo you’re already using (by resizing and dragging it to a new position), or delete the photo you no longer want.
You won’t have to tap the share icon in every case to add pictures to a designated album or to delete them. After making your picture selections, look for Add To and the trash can icon at the bottom of the screen. Tap Add To and then, from the list that appears, tap the album where you want the pictures you’ve chosen to land. If you tap the trash can icon instead, you can dispose of the selected photos.
Remember the old-fashioned photo booths at the local Five and Dime? Remember the Five and Dime? Okay, if you don’t remember such variety stores, your parents probably do, and if they don’t, their parents no doubt do. The point is that photo booths (which do still exist) are fun places to ham it up solo or with a friend as the machine captures and spits out wallet-size pictures.
With the Photo Booth app, Apple has cooked up a modern alternative to a real photo booth. The app is a close cousin to a similar application on the Mac. Here’s how Photo Booth works:
You get the tic-tac-toe-style grid shown in Figure 9-15.
You see your mug through a prism of eight rather wacky special effects: Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl, and Stretch. The center square (what is this, Hollywood Squares?) is the only one in which you come off looking normal — or, as we like to kid, like you’re supposed to look. Some of the effects make you look scary; some, merely goofy.
You can also use the rear camera in Photo Booth to subject your friends to this form of, um, visual abuse.
Ed chose Mirror for the example shown in Figure 9-16 because, after all, two Eds are better than one. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) You can pinch or unpinch the image to further doctor the effect.
If you’re not satisfied with the effect you’ve chosen, tap the icon at the lower-left corner of the app to return to the Photo Booth grid and select another.
Your pic lands (as do other pictures taken with the iPad cameras) in the Camera Roll album.
From the Camera Roll album or from right here in Photo Booth, pictures can be shared in all the usual places or deleted, which you might want to seriously consider, given the distortions you’ve just applied to your face.
Nah, we’re only kidding. Keep the image and take a lot more. Photo Booth may be a blast from the past, but we think it’s just a blast.
And there you have it. You have just passed Photography 101 on the iPad. We trust that the coursework was, forgive another pun, a snap.