Ingest from iPhone

[HI_Tim]

I would love for Photo Mechanic to be able to ingest photos from my iPhone. I find it handy, for example, to take a photo with my iPhone so I can copy its GPS data to photos taken with my cameras. My workflow would be much simpler if I did not have to use a different application to import from the iPhone.

Kirk has explained in the Support Forum that Photo Mechanic is unable to ingest photos from the iPhone because PM only ingests from disks, and the iPhone mounts as something other than a disk. (Try it: in Image Capture's preferences, set PM to open when a camera is attached. Connect your iPhone with photos in its Camera Roll, and PM will open but will not show the iPhone in its Ingest window.)

On my MacBook Pro, Image Capture, iPhoto, Aperture, Nikon Transfer, and even Bridge CS3 (which came out before the iPhone existed) all see the iPhone and import photos from it just as from a camera.

Would it be very difficult to give Photo Mechanic this functionality? I know there are many PM users with iPhones.

[Kirk Baker]

Tim,

I would love for Photo Mechanic to be able to ingest photos from my iPhone. I find it handy, for example, to take a photo with my iPhone so I can copy its GPS data to photos taken with my cameras. My workflow would be much simpler if I did not have to use a different application to import from the iPhone.

Kirk has explained in the Support Forum that Photo Mechanic is unable to ingest photos from the iPhone because PM only ingests from disks, and the iPhone mounts as something other than a disk. (Try it: in Image Capture's preferences, set PM to open when a camera is attached. Connect your iPhone with photos in its Camera Roll, and PM will open but will not show the iPhone in its Ingest window.)

On my MacBook Pro, Image Capture, iPhoto, Aperture, Nikon Transfer, and even Bridge CS3 (which came out before the iPhone existed) all see the iPhone and import photos from it just as from a camera.

Would it be very difficult to give Photo Mechanic this functionality? I know there are many PM users with iPhones.

It definitely isn't trivial.  We would have to use the Image Capture APIs, and then wrap their functionality so that the rest of Ingest would work without modification.  And unfortunately there is to my knowledge no Image Capture for Windows so this would be a Mac-only solution.

There are other solutions:

Phone View (for Mac):

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

Touch Copy (for Windows):

http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/touchcopy/

Both of them mount the iPhone as a disk and Photo Mechanic should work with them.  They are of course not free.  There are cheaper solutions available that run directly on the iPhone like "Air Sharing" from Avatron Software Inc. and "FileMagnet" from Magnetism Studios.

I haven't tested any of them but I'm certain that each of them offers usefulness beyond a potential conduit to Photo Mechanic.

HTH,

-Kirk