Treo 650 Picture Management
At 0.3 megapixels, the camera on our Treo may not be of the highest resolution but it does nonetheless take some pretty decent pictures (it also helps if the photographer is a little inspired).
However, there is one feature of the Camera and its sister Media application on our Treo that has been driving me nuts and which I’ve only recently figured how to manage properly. Namely, if you’ve just snapped some pictures these will most likely have been stored on the precious memory of your Treo instead of an external SD card which cannot be set as default. Additionally, not only does this ‘default to SD card’ setting not exist but selecting all of the images to be copied to card requires the knowledge of a little – not obvious – trick.
This issue of the storage of pictures on the Treo in and of itself would actually not be a major issue but these two missing features make managing your pictures a much more painful process than it should be.
The first is the fact that you should be able to set an album/folder on your SD card as the default storage location for the pictures that you snap with the Camera application but there is currently no such setting.
It is true that like me you could alternatively create an album on your SD card (via the Media application or Camera) and then select the pull down menu at the bottom right corner of the Camera display to save your pictures directly to this album on your SD card.
However, because the Camera de-selects the SD card album/folder every time that the SD card is removed you are more likely than not going to forget to re-select the SD album at each startup of the Camera and thus once again automatically save them to internal memory.
I suppose that like many, I’ve now completely given up on the whole ‘Manage Albums’ thing and instead snap and save all the pictures to the default ‘Unfiled’ album on my Treo which leads me to the second missing feature. Namely, you should be able to ‘Select All’ the pictures that you’ve taken and easily export them to your SD card.
The fact is that there isn’t a ‘Select All’ in the Media menu but instead there’s a ‘Copy to Card’ and also ‘Delete’ which will respectively only allow you to select just one single picture for export or deletion – the one that you have highlighted. So naturally, if you have a dozen (or worse even more) pictures you’ll have to repeat this tedious manual process a dozen times to copy and then again to delete.
However, there is a hidden ‘Select All’ feature that I’ve only now figured out how to access. At the top right of the Media application select the pull down and then toggle between the internal ‘All’ and ‘Unfiled’. Once you’ve done this press the 5Way Down once and you’ll see that instead of having one single image selected you’ll have a thick top and bottom blue line to indicate that all of your images have been selected.
With all your pictures thus selected you can now go to the Menu > Copy to Card then Select All which will export all of them to your card. Next you’ll want to go to Menu > Delete then Select All to finally remove all of these images to recover the space from your internal memory and be able to start from scratch. Thereafter you can always access your pictures by selecting the SD card icon in Media.
It’s a shame that I find myself having to write all of this for something that really should be completely straightforward but I hope that again our next Treo will have learned a few more lessons.
UPDATE
Interesting Treonauts comments…
Default to SD Card: “You CAN set the cam/vid app to use the SD card as DEFAULT storage. In the cam/vid app on the bottom right side of the screen below the image size (640 x 480 or 320 x 240) you will see a box that says "unfiled" click it. Then you will notice “unfiled” is listed twice once above a dashed line and once below the dashed line. If you select the one below the dashed line then the photos/vids will be saved to the card.” [Thanks Ink]
- It is true that this will work OK unless 1) you remove the SD card while still in the Camera application or 2) you use multiple SD cards.
Select All: “Just select the first picture, then push left on the D-Pad. Now the entire box is selected.” or “If you have one picture highlighted you can press space to do the Select All and then you can Delete quickly by pressing the Backspace key”. [Thanks Jim & Cripple]
- Both of these options work well and the second one is probably the easiest to use.
Treonauts demand efficient simplicity…
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Comments
Additionally annoying is the fact that you can't change the default name to YR_MONTH_DAY. Rather, it's the usual Month_Day_YR. Which is annoying if you take pictures for more than one year!
Overall, I have better luck using Resco Photo Viewer (for on-Palm Photo management, cropping, and other nice photo editing -- color, contrast, brightness) and SplashPhoto for their alternate Desktop photo management and faster (than Palm Camera software) on-Palm photo viewing. If I could only combine these two! Actually, if Resco Viewer had a Desktop photo management tool... Mmmmmm.... I'd take it hands down.
Unfortunately, the fastest photo taker is Palm Camera. Taking photos to the SD card with SplashPhoto is sloooooww, and slower saving pictures to the Internal memory that the Palm Cameral software.
While annoying, there's a reason for not allowing a default to the SD card, namely anything on the SD card is not sync'd via hotsync. Thus you could lose all your pics. Palm, while allowing for SD card use, doesn't allow any of their default/stock apps to be card dependant or to default to the SD card as things would fail if the card weren't there. This would generate lots of additional support calls for them. Personally, I'd like to see Blazer store its cache on the card, but I could also see
Blazer failing if it did this. But such is life...
This is exactly why I've switched to SplashPhoto, and never looked back.
There are options for "Move All...", "Categorize All...", and "Delete All...".
I usually categorize things after a particular event, so this makes it easy. Let's say I've just returned from a baseball game with some friends. While there, I took several photos. Just open SplashPhoto, select "Unfiled", then "Move All..." One step to put them all on the card. One more step ("Categorize All..."), and I'm all set.
You CAN set the cam/vid app to use the SD card as DEFAULT storage. In the cam/vid app on the bottom right side of the screen below the image size (640 x 480 or 320 x 240) you will see a box that says "unfiled" click it. Then you will notice “unfilled” is listed twice once above a dashed line and once below the dashed line. If you select the one below the dashed line then the photos/vids will be saved to the card. And you can confirm you did this correctly as on the left side of the screen you should see an increase in the number of pics you can take or the time left for video recording.
Enjoy---
WAAAY to many steps there! Just select the first picture, then push left on the D-Pad. Now the entire box is selected.
True, it would be nice if it were DOCUMENTED, but it's quite easy to select all photos for copying.
As for defaulting to SD card, it would be easy for Palm to program it to check for the SD card EVERY TIME and save to internal when not present. There is no reason to permanently change the settings (and force the user to change them back) just because the card wasn't found once.
- Jim
Maybe someone could write a simple Palm program/hack that "automatically" sets default photo storage to a directory of the user's choice on the SD card? I would pay a few $$ for this...
I've had a todo for a while now to really clean up my picture management on the Treo. Beyond what is discussed above, I need to figure out the best way to optimize the size of pictures that import from elsewhere. Like when I want to carry some pictures I took on a 4mp camera on the Treo, but don't want it to be any larger than 640x480. If their coming from my home computer, I just email the original from iPhoto and select small size. But for other random pictures I might receive in email, or ones I've imported already that are too large, I haven't figured out the best what to reduce them. Any ideas?
I use iPhoto to import all the images I wanted and then I chose to export all the images during the export you had an opportunity to choose the maximum size of the image and I typed 640x640 in the two boxes to make sure that the size was constrained in each direction. Then I loaded them onto my (SD Card) palm for use as a photo album in different directories so that the "albums" were already organized.
2 things, I am thinking that I could have used 320x320 for even more space because the palm doesn't seem to "display a difference " between photos that are 320 and those that are 640 on my Treo650. You can tell the difference once they are on my mac however. Second, albums with more than a hundred or so pictures are so slow it is unusable. I currently have 880 pictures in 51.4MB. YMMV.
Quickly some more tips about this.
1. If you have one picture highlighted you can press space to do the select all
2. You can Delete quickly by pressing the Backspace key
3. Fortunately, if you enable the DateStamp On in the Camera App, it takes the format from your Prefs.
And one more tip (apologies if already known):
If *no* pictures are highlighted or *all* pictures are highlighted, and then "Delete...", "Beam...", "Copy to Card...", or other choice from the main menu is selected, a "selection window" will appear that allows you to mark (or unmark) each picture simply by tapping it; then hit the button at the bottom of the screen to complete the action on *only* those pictures that are marked. This is the handy way to manipulate more than one but less than all.
Is there anyway to put a password lock on Albums stored in the Treo 650 main memory?
I have over 100 pix on my 650 treo. Now I know how to get them on my card, what is the easiest way to get them on my mac? I'm new to this thing. thanks
Um, thats why I read the manual. Do you think they make these like they make Super Mario? With all kinds of hidden treasure? Nahh. Some things actually require reading the instructions. I know thats a bad word.
Having a problem exporting photos from my camera to my computer...never had a problem before until now..
Then i tried sending them to my email and gave me an mms error....any suggestions are appreciated.
Hello, I have delected pictures that we at the treo 650, and I dont have a card, only the one inside the phone, is there a way I could rescue it? Thank you!
I'm going nuts. After many happy and reasonbly trouble-free years, suddenly my Treo 650 won't synch photos. It synchs calendar items and contacts just fine--but for some reason the media folder on my desktop no longer talks to my Treo or vice versa. Anyone have any experience with this? Warning: although I'm no luddite, I have fairly recently fallen off the turnip truck when it comes to dealing with technology. Any help appreciated!
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