Chapter 9

“Smile”: Taking Pictures with Your iPhone

In This Chapter

Taking pictures

Focusing and exposing your shot

Importing your pictures

Viewing and admiring pictures

Using Photo Stream

Creating a slideshow

It’s no longer news that camera phones outsell dedicated digital cameras. What is news to some is the number of camera features built into smartphones, compared to when cameras in phones were for the most part an afterthought.

The camera in the iPhone has always been among the very best, and the cameras in the iPhone 6 and especially 6 Plus are the best cameras to date from Apple, and among the best camera phones, period. But the picture takers inside the models that came before these models aren’t slouches either.

Such models are fast, easy to use, and sport some neat features, most notably the capability to apply a variety of filters and to shoot a burst of photos in the blink of an eye.

We get to all these features over the next several pages. We then move on to the real magic — making the digital photos that reside on the iPhone come alive — whether you imported them from your computer or captured them with the iPhone’s camera.

Taking Your Best Shot

As with many apps on the iPhone, you find the Camera app icon on the Home screen. Unless you moved things around, the Camera app is positioned on the upper row of icons, all the way to the right and adjacent to its next of kin, the Photos icon. We tap both icons throughout this chapter.

Might as well snap an image now:

1. Fire up the camera itself. Choose one of the following:
   • On the Home screen, tap the Camera app icon. Or from the Lock screen, drag the Camera icon from the bottom-right corner in an upward motion.
   • Drag Control Center up from the bottom of the screen and tap the Camera app icon in there.
2. Keep your eyes peeled on the iPhone display.

   You are taken to the viewfinder window. We get to the controls that frame that window shortly.

3. Aim the camera at whatever you want to shoot.

   Use the iPhone’s display as your viewfinder. We marvel at the iPhone’s display throughout this book; the Camera app gives us another reason to do so.

   Photographers with the latest iPhones running iOS 8 have several basic shooting formats. You move from one format to another by swiping right or left (in portrait mode) or by swiping up or down (in landscape mode). Your choices are Video (kindly read the next chapter for more), Photo (your basic snapshot), Square (for a picture formatted to make nice with the popular Instagram photo-sharing app), and Pano (short for panorama).

   iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus owners have two more options: Time-Lapse (accelerated sequence) and Slo-Mo video. You find out more about them in the next chapter.

4. When you’ve chosen a shooting format and are satisfied with what’s in the frame, do one of the following to snap the picture:
   • Tap the round camera button. The button is at the bottom center of the screen in portrait mode (see Figure 9-1) or on the right in landscape mode. As we show you in a moment, you’ll be able to change the point of focus if necessary.
   • Press the physical volume up or volume down button. These buttons are on the side of the phone (portrait mode) or at the top of the device (landscape mode). We generally consider this method a better way of shooting because it mimics the experience of capturing photos with a regular camera, at least when you’re holding the phone sideways. If you’re an iPhone traditionalist, however, don’t let us stop you from continuing to use the on-screen camera button method.

   That’s it: You’ve snapped your first iPhone picture.

5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 to capture additional images.

If you position the iPhone sideways while snapping an image, the picture is saved in landscape mode.

Keeping Things in Focus

The camera in the iPhone can detect up to ten faces in a scene, placing a rectangle on top of each mug (the focus box in Figure 9-1). Behind the scenes, the camera is balancing the exposure across each face. If you want to lock the focus and exposure settings while taking a picture, press and hold your finger against the screen until the rectangle pulses. AE/AF Lock will appear on the screen. Tap the screen again to make AE/AF Lock disappear.

If you have the 6 Plus, your photography skills get an added boost from optical image stabilization, which uses complex algorithms to help you compensate for a case of the shakes. It works with the A8 chip, gyroscope, and M8 motion coprocessor inside the phone to improve the results of your pictures in dimmer light.

The iPhone 6 employs a somewhat less effective digital image stabilization method to compensate for a jittery shooter.

Next to the focus box in Figure 9-1 is a box labeled with 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. You can change the exposure settings of a given shot by up to four f-stops. And you can lighten or darken scenes for both still photos and video.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus also include a focus pixels sensor. Think of it as a fancy under-the-hood tool to help the cameras focus faster and focus better.

You can also exploit a feature known as HDR, or high dynamic range, photography. Tap the HDR button (labeled in Figure 9-1) to turn on HDR. The HDR feature takes three separate exposures (long, normal, short) and blends the best parts of the three shots into a single image. In Settings (under Photos & Camera), you can choose to keep the “normal” photo along with your HDR result or just hang onto the latter.

On the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, you can also exploit HDR on the front-facing FaceTime HD camera. This, too, can be applied to bolster both stills and videos.

While you’re in the Photos & Camera settings, note that you can also turn on grid lines, which help you frame a shot using the photographic principle known as the Rule of Thirds.

From the front to the rear — and back

We figure that most of the time, you’ll use the main rear camera while shooting pictures (or video). But you may want to capture a selfie, or a shot of your own pretty face, to post, say, on a social networking site such as Facebook. Not a problem. Just tap the front/rear camera switch at the upper-right corner of the screen (labeled in Figure 9-1) to toggle between the front and rear cameras.

Apple calls the front camera the FaceTime camera because you can use it for the FaceTime video-calling feature discussed in Chapter 4. The rear camera is called the iSight camera.

Firing up the flash

The iPhone has an LED (light-emitting diode) flash that controls pictures taken with the rear camera. Because no flash is associated with the front-facing camera, you won’t see the flash button (labeled in Figure 9-1) when you’re using that camera. When the button is available, tap it to change the setting to On, Off, or Auto. We suggest using the Auto setting, which lets the iPhone decide when it’s a good idea to fire up the flash.

If you own the iPhone 5s, 6, or 6 Plus, you have a device with not one but two flashes as part of a, um, flashy feature Apple refers to as True Tone flash. The two flashes — one white, one amber — work in tandem to match the flash to the ambient lighting in your shooting environment. The system determines the light intensity and which combination of the two flashes to fire off automatically, with more than 1,000 possible combinations, Apple says.

You don’t need to worry about any of this when you’re out taking pictures. Just turn the flash setting to On or leave it in Auto and trust True Tone flash to choose an appropriate combination. Although not every flash photo you take will be ready to hang in a museum, much less over your fireplace — hey, the photographer has to bear some responsibility — we can tell you that we’ve been extremely pleased with most of the flash pictures we’ve snapped on the 5s, 6, and 6 Plus.

Using digital zoom

When you spread your fingers or bring them closer together on the screen, the zoom slider appears. Continuing to pinch or unpinch has the same effect of dragging the slider to the right or left. The zoom feature works when shooting video too.

You may not always love the results you get when zooming in. The iPhone has a digital zoom, not an optical zoom, and the quality distinction is enormous. Digital zoom in Photos enables you to get closer to your subject by zooming in up to 5x, but it also effectively crops and blows up part of image, which can result in fuzziness or blurring. Not to sound harsh, but a subject’s imperfections — and any inadequacies on the photographer’s part — may come to light.

The cameras also have a 3x video zoom that uses a higher quality crop zoom to allow the phone to get up to three times closer to your subject while helping to preserve the original image quality.

If you’re traveling to San Francisco, you’ll want a picture of the magnificent span that is the Golden Gate Bridge. In the Himalayas, you’d want a memento of Mount Everest. At a family reunion, you want that epic image of your entire extended clan. For just such moments, we recommend the panorama feature, which lets you can shoot up to 240 degrees and stitch together a high-resolution image of up to 28 megapixels on the iPhone 5, 5c, and 5s and up to 43 megapixels on the 6 and 6 Plus.

To get going, drag the screen so that Pano (panorama) becomes your shooting mode of choice. The word Pano will be in yellow, just under a yellow dot and above 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, as shown in Figure 9-2. (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, tap Done and admire your handiwork (refer to Figure 9-2).

Applying filters

The beauty of photo software is that you can edit and doctor up pictures to make them look sillier, funkier, and prettier — or even go from color to black and white. You accomplish these enhancements by using editing tools included in the Photos app, as outlined later in this chapter, or in any number of third-party apps.

If you have the 5 or a later model, Apple lets you apply color effects before you take your shots. Even better, these handy tools are live filters, so you can see the effect of changing from one filter to another before deciding which works best for a given scene. The iPhone 4s can apply these effects only in the Photos app, after the pictures have been taken.

To apply a filter, tap the three-dot filters icon at the bottom-right corner of the display, and then tap any of the eight filters shown in Figure 9-3, left, from a black-and-white Noir image to a Chrome picture somewhat reminiscent, we suppose, of the days of Kodachrome film. Or tap the ninth choice right dab in the middle, None, to go back to a normal color image.

You can apply filters after you take a picture as well, as part of your editing suite. That way, you have a normal picture and the filtered one. If you apply a filter before you shoot, the camera will take a picture only in that filtered mode.

Binging on burst shooting

Even top-notch photographers need help sometimes getting that perfect action shot or sequence of shots. Burst mode provides that help on the iPhone 5s and later models. Shoot with confidence, knowing that you won’t miss Junior kicking in the game-winner in soccer. (Through software enhancements in iOS 8, Apple improved the slower burst mode capabilities on some older iPhone models.)

Capturing pictures rapid fire — at a blistering rate of 10 images per second, up to 999 images — couldn’t be any easier. When you’re ready to shoot, press your finger against the camera button and keep it there until you’re satisfied that you have what you want. The A7 chip in the 5s and the A8 chip in the 6 and 6 Plus include an image signal processor that works with the iSight camera and the camera’s software to automatically focus the burst photos.

With the 6 and 6 Plus, Apple added this burst capability to the FaceTime HD camera. For the vainest selfies or group shots, the iPhone will capture each and every one. Burst mode bursts out 10 images per second on this front camera as well, and Apple says every burst sequence is analyzed in real time for sharpness and clarity. Face detection has also been improved, and Apple even claims to better identify blinks and smiles.

Speaking of selfies, the FaceTime camera on the 6 and 6 Plus also has an f/2.2 aperture. With that aperture and a new sensor, Apple claims that the FaceTime camera can capture 81 percent more light.

We think that burst mode is a great feature. But Apple recognized that in most cases, you’re probably not going to want to keep each and every photo you take during your shooting binge, especially when you end up with hundreds. Fortunately, the software in the phone processes the images in real time and suggests the pictures it thinks you’ll like the most based on factors such as clarity, sharpness, and even whether a subject’s eyes are closed.

So how does Apple surface the best pictures? So glad you asked.

Tap the thumbnail preview of the last shot taken (labeled in Figure 9-1). You are transported to the iPhone’s Recently Added folder (or Camera Roll), where all the pictures you’ve shot on the phone (and haven’t subsequently deleted) hang out. You can get to the Recently Added folder (or Camera Roll) also from the Photos app. (We spend more time in this app later in the chapter.)

You can tell whether a photo is part of a shooting binge in three ways. In the first way, the word Burst appears in the upper left of the image, with a numerical count of burst photos in parentheses. (In Figure 9-4, 11 photos make up this particular burst.) The second way is by visiting the premade Bursts album that Apple conveniently supplies for your bursts of expression. Still another way is exposed when you come to the Recently Added folder (or Camera Roll) from the Camera or Photos app. 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 moments view in the Photos app.) Tap the thumbnail now.

As Figure 9-4 reveals, you see a Select button at the bottom of the picture from a burst sequence. Tap Select. The selected image from your burst appears front and center, as shown in Figure 9-5, bordered by the edges of other photos from the sequence, which in this view you can barely see.

At the bottom of the display is a strip of thumbnails, each representing a picture from this batch. Below one or more of these images, you may see a grey dot, indicating that the photo is one that Apple has determined is the best or among the best of the bunch. Scroll to the left or right to examine the other pictures in the grouping and to see whether other pictures have a gray dot.

As you scroll, if you agree with Apple’s suggestions and want to keep a selected image, tap the circle in the lower-right corner of the image so that a check mark appears, which prepares the photo to be copied as a stand-alone image in the Recently Added album (or Camera Roll). Tap Done. You are given the option at that point to keep all the photos that the iPhone captured as part of your burst sequence (by tapping a Keep Everything button) or just the one or more images that you’ve manually selected (by tapping a Keep Only x Favorites button). Indeed, absolutely nothing is stopping you from checking off pictures that Apple has not elevated to chosen status so that they too become stand-alones in Recently Added.

If you’re not satisfied with any of the pictures, you can deep-six them all. Open Recently Added from the Photos app, tap the thumbnail for this particular burst, and tap the delete icon in the bottom-right corner. Apple will make doubly sure that you want to remove all the pictures in this sequence by making you tap a Delete x Photos button before completing the deed.

In Settings, under Photos & Camera, you can turn on a switch that will upload all your burst photos to Photo Stream, a topic we’ll address later in this chapter. If this switch is off, only favorite burst photos will be uploaded to Photo Stream. You can designate a photo a favorite by tapping the heart icon below the image.

Using the self-timer

Many physical cameras have a self-timer that lets you be part of a picture, perhaps in a group setting with friends. The new self-timer built into the Camera app in iOS 8 adds this functionality to your iPhone, whether you’re using the front or rear camera. If anything, the addition of the self-timing feature might improve the quality of your selfies.

Tap the timer icon (labeled in Figure 9-1) and choose the 3 seconds or 10 seconds as the time interval between when you press the shutter and when the picture is captured. You’ll see a countdown on the screen, and then the phone will capture a burst of 10 images.

To turn off the self-timer, tap the Off button. Couldn’t be easier than that.

Tracking Down Your Pictures

So where exactly do your pictures live on the iPhone? In the “Binging on burst shooting” section, we gave this answer away, partly anyway. As we mentioned, the pictures you snap on the iPhone first land in a photo album appropriately dubbed Recently Added, the album formerly known as 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. For more on importing pictures, we invite you visit www.dummies.com/extras/iphone.

Moreover, as part of iOS 8, every picture you take with your phone (and other iOS 8 devices) can be stored in a new iCloud Photo Library. You can access any of these pics if you have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection to the Internet. No more fretting about images hogging too much storage space on your phone. What’s more, the pictures are stored in the cloud at their full resolution in their original formats. (Apple will leave behind versions that are ideally sized for your phone.)

You can still download to the phone 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 9-6. We take these on one by one.

Choosing albums

Tapping Albums lists all the albums you have on your phone, with Recently Added (refer to Figure 9-6) sitting on top. You can change the order of the list later. Apple has kindly supplied a couple of additional premade albums: Panoramas, for all the panoramic scenes you’ve captured, Time-lapse, Bursts, and Videos. (The process of shooting videos is described in the next chapter.)

Albums that were synced from your Macintosh computer 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 9-7, which reveals the by-now-familiar Recently Added 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.

You’ll know when a thumbnail represents a video rather than a still image because the thumbnail displays a tiny movie camera icon accompanied by the length of the video. Or you’ll see a hatched circle, which represents video captured in slow motion or a time-lapse, a topic reserved for the next chapter.

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 will 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 a new album from the albums view by tapping the + in the upper-left corner (refer to Figure 9-6) and choosing a name for the album. Type that name and tap 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.

Albums you create on the iPhone reside only on the iPhone. They can’t be synced or copied to your PC or Mac.

Categorizing your pics

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 this 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 9-8 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 9-8, left), and slightly bigger thumbnails appear as part of the collections view (Figure 9-8, center). Tap again, and the thumbnails get just a little bit bigger in the moments view (Figure 9-8, 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 phone knows where the pictures were taken. (Location Services must be turned on under Privacy Settings.) If you tap a place location, Apple will fire up a map and show you how many pictures were taken in the area, as shown in Figure 9-9.

To quickly skim all the pictures in the years or collections views, 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 9-10. Tap again and those picture controls disappear and the picture is bordered on the top and bottom by black bars.

Apple summarizes photos in the collections and years views by showing you only a representative sample for those collections and years. To see every photo in your library that fits those views, go to Settings⇒Photos & Camera and turn on Summarize Photos by tapping the switch to make it green.

Organizing your places, faces, and events

You’ve seen how pictures on the iPhone can be organized into albums, years, collections, and moments. The iPhone 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 iPhone and back, a process that is even simpler through iCloud. When the iPhone 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 9-11, 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.

Searching for pictures

iOS 8 has one more feature to help you find a given photo among the thousands if not tens of thousands you’ve shot. You can search your entire photo library in the cloud. From the Photos app, tap the search icon, the one that resembles a magnifying glass.

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 below a chosen image. You can also consult a Recent Searches grouping. Or just type a search term with the onscreen keyboard, perhaps the date or the time a photo was taken or the location where it was shot.

Sharing your photos

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 they make available to you. Here’s how:

1. On the Home screen, tap Settings.
2. Tap Photos & Camera.
3. If the iCloud Photo Sharing option isn’t on, tap it to turn it on.
4. Open the Photos app, and then tap the Shared tab.
5. Tap the + at the upper-left corner of the screen, and then type a name for your stream in the iCloud dialog that appears.

   The name is your call, but we recommend something descriptive, along the lines of My Trip to Tahiti (and you should be so lucky).

6. Tap Next and choose who will receive your stream, as shown in Figure 9-12.

   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 New Stream.

7. Above the To field, tap Create.
8. Add photos to the shared stream by selecting the stream, making sure the Photos tab at the bottom of the display (as opposed to the adjacent People tab) is selected and tapping +. You can choose from years, collections, or moments.
9. (Optional) Enter a comment.
10. Tap Post.

    The recipient will receive an email similar to the one in Figure 9-13 and can choose to subscribe to the stream by tapping the button shown.

We recommend checking out the activity view at the top of the Shared tab. It provides a nice summary of photos you and your pals posted.

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 stream 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 stream in question. This time, tap the People tab instead of the Photos tab and then flip the Public Website switch to on.

If the people with whom you’re sharing have their own iCloud accounts and are on an iOS 6 account or later or 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.

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, tap the Delete Photo Stream button. To remove a subscriber, tap the stream, tap the People tab, 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.

Admiring Your Pictures

Photographs are meant to be seen, of course, not buried in the digital equivalent of a shoebox. The iPhone affords you some neat ways to manipulate, view, and share your best photos.

Maneuvering and manipulating 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:

• Skip ahead or view the preceding picture: From a moments or album view, flick your finger left or right.
• Switch from landscape or portrait mode: The iPhone’s cool sensors are at work. When you turn the iPhone sideways, the picture automatically reorients itself from portrait to landscape mode, as the images in Figure 9-14 show. Rotate the device back to portrait mode and the picture readjusts accordingly.

  

• Zoom: Double-tap to zoom in on an image and make it larger. Do so again to zoom out and make it smaller. Alternatively, on the photo, pinch your thumb and index finger together to zoom in and unpinch them to zoom out.
• Pan and scroll: This cool little feature was once practically guaranteed to make you the life of the party. Now it’s commonplace if no less cool. After you zoom in on a picture, drag it around the screen with your finger. Besides impressing your friends, you can bring front and center the part of the image you most care about. That lets you zoom in on Fido’s adorable face as opposed to, say, the unflattering picture of the person holding the dog in his lap.

Launching slideshows

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 iPhone:

1. Choose an album in the albums list.

   To do so, tap the Photos icon from the Home screen or tap the Recently Added button in the Camera app.

2. Do one of the following:
   • In the Photos app: Select a picture from an album, tap it to summon the picture controls (as shown in Figure 9-15), and then tap the share icon, in the bottom left. At the top of the screen, the image you selected as the basis of your slideshow has a check mark, as shown in Figure 9-16. Scroll to the left or right to view other pictures in the album and tap any or all of those adjacent images to select them for the slideshow as well. Check marks appear as you do so. Tap any picture a second time to deselect it and remove the check mark.
   • In the Camera app: Tap the image in the lower-left corner of the screen to display the most recent image you’ve shot, and find a picture to include in your slideshow. From there, follow the instructions for the Photos app to tap and choose other images for the slideshow.
3. Tap Slideshow.

   You are taken to the Slideshow Options screen.

4. Choose transition effects and the music (if any) that you’d like to accompany the slideshow.

   You have five transitions choices (cube, dissolve, ripple, wipe across, wipe down). Why not try them all, to see what you like? You can choose the music from your iTunes stash.

   

   

5. Choose where you get to see the slideshow.

   You can see the slideshow on your iPhone itself or have it beamed wirelessly to an Apple TV, should you own Apple’s $99 set-top box.

6. Tap Start Slideshow.

   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:

• Play Each Slide For: You have five choices (2 seconds, 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds). When you’re finished, tap the Photos button to return to the main Settings screen for Photos.
• Repeat: If this option is turned on, the slideshow continues to loop until you stop it. If it’s turned off, the slideshow for your album plays just once.
• Shuffle: Turning on this switch plays slides in random order.

Press the Home button to leave the settings and return to the Home screen.

Storing pictures in the (i)Cloud

As mentioned, through the iCloud service, any photo you take with the iPhone or with another iOS 8 device can be automatically stored in the cloud and pushed to another iPhone, or your PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple TV (third generation or later). The transfer takes place through the magic of My Photo Stream, 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.

And you need no longer fret about storage space when using Photo Stream. Apple used to store the last 1,000 pictures you took over a 30-day period in a special Photo Stream 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 Photo Stream album into other albums on your iPhone or other iOS devices and computers, should you want to view those pictures when you don’t have an Internet connection.

There’s a catch to using the iCloud Photo Library: You have to pay for storage. You get 5GB of iCloud storage gratis, but shutterbugs will use that amount in a flash. You can get 25GB of storage (which includes the 5GB free) for $11.99 a year, 200GB for $3.99 a month, 500GB for $9.99 a month, and 1 terabyte for $19.99 a month.

Photos taken on the iPhone aren’t whisked to Photo Stream 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 Recently Added (found 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 phone. We found this last feature handy when writing this book.

You can save pictures in the Recently Added album to any other album on the phone. 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 bottom of screen and pick the new album destination for your chosen images.

If for some reason the pictures you snap on the iPhone are not uploaded, go to Settings, scroll down and tap Photos & Camera, and make sure My Photo Stream is turned on.

Editing and Deleting Photos

The iPhone 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 9-17, left, reveals.

The screen sports the following icons:

• Rotate, straighten and crop: Tapping the icon to the right of Cancel summons a number of additional icons and controls, as shown in Figure 9-17, center. You can
  • Straighten a crooked image or vice versa. Rotate the numbered dial and watch the affect on the photo. Click Done when you’re satisfied with how the image looks.
  • Rotate the entire image counterclockwise.
  • Crop the image. Tap the crop icon, and choose among the various aspect ratio options. Press your finger against the image to drag the photo around a crop grid to get it just as you would like, pinching and unpinching as you see fit to get closer up or farther away. When you’re satisfied with the result, tap Crop and then tap Save. Or tap Cancel to revert to the original.
• Auto-enhance: Let the iPhone take a stab at making your image look better. Apple lightens or darkens the picture, tweaks color saturation, and more. Repeatedly tap the icon to turn this tool on or off. Tap Done if you like the result.
• Add a filter: You met this feature in the “Applying filters” section, earlier in this chapter. But that section described filters before you fire off the shutter. Here, you can choose a filter — Mono, Tonal, Noir, Fade, Chrome, Process, Transfer, and Instant — after the fact. If you’re not satisfied after applying a filter, tap None to go back to the original photo.

  The iPhone camera doesn’t let you apply filters before you shoot a panorama, but you can add the filters during this editing stage.

• Adjust light, color, b&w: Apple provides numerous editing controls to adjust exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, and black point (Light); saturation, contrast, and cast (Color); and intensity, neutrals, tone, and grain (B&W). For example, Figure 9-17, right, shows how you might change the look of a picture through the use of shadows.

If you aren’t satisfied with any of the edits that you’ve applied to your pictures, you can always tap Reset to revert to the original.

Apple now allows third-party app makers to make their own filters and editing tools readily accessible from the Photos app.

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 them fast enough. Fortunately, the iPhone makes it a cinch to bury the evidence:

1. Tap the objectionable photograph.
2. Tap to display the picture controls, if they’re not already displayed.
3. Tap the trashcan icon.
4. Tap Delete Photo (or Cancel, if you change your mind).

   The photo gets sucked into the trashcan and mercifully disappears. It’s also deleted from Photo Stream across all your devices.

More (Not So) Stupid Picture Tricks

You can take advantage of the photos on the iPhone in a few more ways. In each case, you tap the picture and make sure the picture controls are displayed. Then tap the share icon, at the bottom left (and shown in the margin) to display the choices shown in Figure 9-18 (not all choices are visible).

Here’s a rundown of each choice:

• AirDrop: AirDrop is a neat wireless method for sharing photos, videos, or other files with folks who happen to be nearby and also have an iOS 7- or iOS 8-capable device or a Mac running Yosemite. If we’re talking iPhones specifically, you’ll need the iPhone 5 or later. You turn on the feature in Control Center (see Chapter 2) and choose whether to make your phone discoverable to everyone or just contacts who are in the vicinity. Tap a photo to select it and then tap the icon representing the device owned by the person with whom you are trying to share the image. That person will receive an invitation to accept the photograph or reject it, as shown in Figure 9-19. If the photo is accepted, the picture lands on the person’s phone almost immediately.
• Message: Apple and your provider support picture messaging through MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Tap the Message option, and the picture is embedded in your outgoing message; you merely need to enter the phone number or name of the person to whom you’re sending the picture. If that person is also using an iOS 5 or later device, the photo will be sent as an iMessage, which doesn’t count against your texting allotment.

  

• Mail: Some photos are so precious that you just have to share them with family members and friends. When you tap Mail, the picture is automatically embedded in the body of an outgoing email message. Use the virtual keyboard to enter the email addresses, subject line, and any comments you want to add — you know, something profound, such as “Isn’t this a great-looking photo?” After tapping Send to whisk picture and accompanying message on their way, you have the option to change the image size (small, medium, or large) or keep the actual size. Consider the trade-offs: A smaller-sized image may get through any limits imposed by your or the recipient’s Internet provider or company. But if you can get the largest image through, you’ll give the recipient the full picture (forgive the pun) in all its glory. (Check out Chapter 12 for more info on using email.)
• iCloud Photo Sharing: You can post pics to a shared album.
• Twitter: Lots of people send pictures with their tweets these days. The iPhone makes it breeze. Tap Twitter and your picture is embedded in an outgoing tweet. Just add your words, sticking to Twitter’s character limit of 140, and tap Post.
• Facebook: And lots of people share photos on the world’s largest social network. After your Facebook account is configured, you too can post there from your iPhone.
• Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo: If you’ve enabled a Chinese keyboard, you’ll see options for China’s own social networks.
• Flickr: The Yahoo!-owned service is another popular photo-sharing destination.
• Copy: Tap to copy the image and then paste it into an email or elsewhere.
• Slideshow: As mentioned, this is your starting point for a slideshow, complete with an optional musical soundtrack.
• AirPlay: Own an Apple TV set-top box? You can use AirPlay to stream photos from the phone to the TV.
• Save Image: If you didn’t shoot the image in question on your iPhone but want to add it to the device, tap the Save Image option.
• Assign to Contact: If you assign a picture to someone in your Contacts list, the picture you assign pops up whenever you receive a call from that person. Tap Assign to Contact. Your list of contacts appears on the screen. Scroll through the list to find the person who matches the picture of the moment. As with the Use as Wallpaper option (described next), you can drag and resize the picture to get it just right. Then tap Set Photo.

  As Chapter 4 explains, 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 iPhone’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.

• Use as Wallpaper: The Apple-supplied background images on the iPhone can’t measure up to pictures of your spouse, your kids, or your pet, perhaps. When you tap the Use as Wallpaper button, you see what the present image looks like as the iPhone’s background picture. And as Figure 9-20 shows, you’re given the opportunity to move the picture around and resize it, through the now-familiar action of dragging or pinching against the screen with your fingers. You can even see how the picture looks against the time and date that appear on the Lock screen. Another option is to take advantage of the Perspective Zoom setting. When this setting is turned on, you can exploit a parallax animation effect in which the picture moves as you move the phone. Tap the screen to toggle the setting on or off. When you’re satisfied with what the wallpaper looks like, tap the Set button. Options appear that let you use the photo as wallpaper for the Lock screen, the Home screen, or both. Per usual, you also have the option to tap Cancel. (You find out more about wallpaper in Chapter 14.)

  

• Print: If you have an AirPrint-capable printer, tap Print to print the photo. You can choose how many copies of the print you want to duplicate.

Sometimes you want to make decisions about multiple pictures at the same time, whether you’re sharing them online, copying or printing them, adding them to a new album, or deleting them in bulk. Here’s a convenient way to do so. Launch the Photos app and either tap a specific album in the app or open up to a moments view so that you see thumbnails of your pictures. Next, tap Select at the upper-right, and then tap each thumbnail on which you’re planning to take action, so that a check mark appears. As you do, the count for each picture you select increases. From here, you can tap the share icon to share pictures on a social network in bulk, email them, send them via a message, or copy or print them. The options that appear may vary depending on how many pictures you’ve selected — there’s a limit on the number of photos you can email, for example.

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 trashcan 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 trashcan icon instead, you can delete the selected photos.

Before leaving this photography section, we want to steer you to the App Store, which we explore in greater depth in Chapter 15. As of this writing, hundreds, probably thousands, of photography-related apps are available, many free. That’s too many to mention here, but we know you’ll find terrific photo apps just by wandering around the place. And Apple has opened up the iSight camera to third-party developers, so you can expect ongoing innovation.

You have just passed Photography 101 on the iPhone. We trust that the coursework was, forgive the pun, a snap.