View speed issue

Hi Ceri,

I will be happy to help you.

I do apologies for the misunderstanding in my previous reply. As stated below and as Enrique pointed out, its a matter of

"when you transfer photos to an iDevice there are 3 versions of the photo that are created: A thumbnail, the original image and what Apple calls a "screen resolution" version which is a medium sized version that is the one used to display on the screen of your device.

So, even if you transfer a huge photo to your device using our app it would not matter in terms of the speed of displaying it. However, as you discovered it the format of the image and how Photoshop saves the JPG's may play a role on how fast the image is rendered on the display even when the medium resolution image is used internally. "

Again, I am sorry for misreading your previous post and I hope the answers provided below where helpful!

Please let us know if I can assist you further!

Kind Regards,

Amber
photo transfer app

...

Hi Ceri,

I found a post by Enrique, from last year, to another customer of the Photo Transfer App, regarding what may be a similar question, or explanation for you, to your question.

The original thread link is ...
https://getsatisfaction.com/photo_tra...

The actual replied text is below;

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Enrique Rodriguez (Official Rep) 1 year ago
Hello,

Thanks for posting your question here. When you transfer photos from iPhone to computer or from iPad to computer the photos are transferred exactly as they are on your device. The photos are not modified or resized, they are transferred at the maximum quality and resolution (original size).

However, if you want to transfer photos from a computer to an iPhone/iPad, the photos will be optimized to be displayed on the device's screen (the 'Photos' app will do this automatically), so the resolution may be reduced if the photos are very large. Basically the maximum resolution you will get will be the maximum resolution that the iPhone or iPad can handle internally when saving a photo.

I hope this answers you question. Please let us know if you have any other question or comment.

Kind regards,

Enrique
Photo Transfer App
----

Hi,

Wow! That's a lot of really fast responses! Thanks very much for your help.

What I did was to first transfer some photos from an iphone 4S to my MacBook Pro, then transfer those photos (from the notebook) to the iPhone 3GS. So, theoretically they should match the target device's resolution. But there is definitely a considerable delay in the photos going from blurry to clear. Also, it sometimes even happens after the photo has become clear and I swipe to return to re-view it (I mean it goes blurry again). I was showing people a bunch of wedding photos that we transferred so the delay was a bit of a drag.

It's not a huge problem... I'm just curious to see if I can rectify it. Im wondering if it could be a 3GS glitch?

Thanks again all,

Ceri

Hi again Ceri, :)

I just checked the "focus speed" of a high-res photo (over 5MB) using my iPad 2 and the built-in Photo App in the iOS 5.1 home screen, and noticed a "lag" in the "blurry to sharp" displaying of it, to be around 1, to at most 1.5 second "delay" to focus it.

If this delay exists within the iPad 2 when first viewing that high-res photo, I'm guessing it's the CPU processor, and/or Graphic processor "loading" the image into the screen for sharp viewing... and may be a normal function of the device it's being viewed on.

The iPhone 3 (and even iPad 1) has a slower CPU and graphic processor than the newer iPhone 4 (or iPad 2 and 3), so it may be normal to focus slower on the older devices.

Does your older device take longer than 1 or 2 seconds to bring the sharp image into view? (that may be normal)
Does it also take that longer time on your iPhone 4s? It shouldn't, unless the photos are way larger than 5 or 6 MB. (~ 8.5 MegaPixel photos)

Even the iPad 2 and 3, and iPhone 4 will take time to "focus" a 16 MegaPixel, or higher, photo on the screen, when flipping thru them.

But as Enrique mentioned, in the post I linked to before, when you transfer to a computer, from a high-res capable iDevice, that photo isn't changed by the transfer.
Only when transferring from / to a higher model iDevice to / from a lower res one.

It actually makes sense, when you think of it.
The device is "converting it" to display on the other device's internal Graphics capability.

So if you need to have them viewed at its highest resolution possible, use the higher-res iDevice. :-) or a Laptop.

Hi,

Thanks again for your helpful and insightful replies.

I just tried replicating the problem by copying different photos between the MacBook Pro, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2 and iPhone4S. All worked fine (with older devices displaying more "blur/delay" time, as expected).

I discovered the problem was actually only happening with some photos that I had retouched and saved using Photoshop on my computer. After saving them as JPG files (quality factor 10) on the notebook and then copying them back to the iPhone, the display time takes WAY longer. It seems that the Photoshop JPG format is slightly different/incompatible/larger than the standard i-device format, so those devices struggle to display the images.

So, although the file sizes were only 3.4MB, after being saved on the Mac (and presumably PC too) with Photoshop the images didn't display well on other devices. Apparently not all JPGs are created equal... I'll do some more research and let you know if there is an optimal Photoshop JPG compression ratio that doesn't cause this... but for now, if I want to display photos quickly on the iPad, etc. I won't do the retouching/saving in Photoshop on the Mac.

So, to summarize... this is NOT a fault of the app (or Photoshop), just a little file format quirk :)

Sorry for wasting your time guys, I really should have figured this one out earlier!

Thanks again :)

Ceri

Hi Ceri,
First, ... Please don't consider your concerns a "waste of time" to either myself, or of course, Enrique, or Amber.

It's customers such as yourself, taking THEIR time, (your time) to figure out situations such as this, that make the Photo Transfer App better, and help this community with similar concerns as yours.

With that said, I'm sure this developer will agree with my above statement. :-)

As for the PhotoShop JPG format, it may even be "news" to Enrique, and much appreciated, for you giving that info here, and taking YOUR time to test this.

It certainly was news to me. :)

If you do find an optimal JPG compression setting, I'm also sure others reading this community supported help site will be interested to hear it as well.

Have you tried to use other file types that the iDevice and Enrique's App support?
Such as RAW format. There are also several kinds of JPG formats that PhotoShop can output a file as.

I think I remember JPG 2000, for one, but do not know if the Photo Transfer App supports all the variations. ... Enrique or Amber can verify if this is true.

Usually, regarding standard JPG's compression factor ... I was once told, or read online, lowering the quality slider to 75% may still give good quality, while making a smaller file-size. But whether the iDevice will benefit from this is still unknown to me.

We're all interested in what your findings show, thanks for your efforts.

Hi Ceri, GVdi1,

Thanks for your interesting discussion and comments. Sorry I didn't provide feedback earlier. The issue with the format and the retouching of the JPG's makes sense. What I wanted to add is that when you transfer photos to an iDevice there are 3 versions of the photo that are created: A thumbnail, the original image and what Apple calls a "screen resolution" version which is a medium sized version that is the one used to display on the screen of your device.

So, even if you transfer a huge photo to your device using our app it would not matter in terms of the speed of displaying it. However, as you discovered it the format of the image and how Photoshop saves the JPG's may play a role on how fast the image is rendered on the display even when the medium resolution image is used internally.

I hope this makes some sense. Let me know if I can provide more feedback about this.

Cheers,

Enrique

Hi,

Thanks very much for your kind help and comments, GVdid1 and Enrique. Your observations and suggestions were really helpful.

After consecutively reducing the JPG compression rate when saving in Photoshop ("Quality" setting, 12 is maximum), and individually copying resulting images to iPhone 4S, I have found the problem! When I went all the way down to 4 in this setting and the photos were still taking ages (15 secs at least) to preview when copied to the iPhone 4S, I suspected it was something else.

It turns out that the "Format options: under the "Quality" setting is the culprit. For me, this was set on "Progressive". After I changed this to "Baseline optimized" and copied to iPhone again... Presto! And you can still use a quality setting of 12 :)

Neat... I'll certainly use this option in the future, as it seems to preview as before with no difference on the computer as well. Thanks again guys!

Ceri

Hi Ceri,
:-)

Well done...!