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Any way to LOWER camera's resolution ?

PassMeAGuinness

PassMeAGuinness

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 20, 2009
50
3
Miami, FL
Greetings all !

I am completely brand new to iOS5 and the iPhone, (just picked it up last week) and I have a question about the camera.

Is there any way to LOWER the camera's resolution, so it its not always at max res ?

I say this because I don't need EVERY single picture I take to be HD or even high quality, at that. Sometimes (most of the time) VGA sized pics will do for me.

So again, does anyone know of a way to do this ? I have tried using the camera and checking settings, but can't find anything.

Perhaps there is an app on the App store that will do this ? If you guys know of any, please let me know.

Thank you all ! :cool:
 
There's no way to do this using the native Camera app.

While I'm not familiar with many 3rd party camera apps, I am familiar with Hipstamatic and I know that app allows you to adjust quality between low res, medium, and full res. But that app is for taking vintage-esque photos and not regular photos, so it's not for everyone.

Anyone with Camera+ know if you can adjust resolution with that app?
 
r2shyyou said:
Anyone with Camera+ know if you can adjust resolution with that app?
Click to expand...


Yep, Camera+ has a 1200x1200 setting in their menu.

Note that this does NOT mean you'll get a square photo. It just means that the shot will be fit within those dimensions. So the actual resolution will be even less than that.
 
Small White Car said:
Yep, Camera+ has a 1200x1200 setting in their menu.

Note that this does NOT mean you'll get a square photo. It just means that the shot will be fit within those dimensions. So the actual resolution will be even less than that.
Click to expand...

Ok good, but more specifically, the main reason I want this feature, is so that the pictures take up less space on my phones memory (even though I bought the 64gb)

So, with camera+, will the photo's file size, be smaller than the default camera's photo size ?

Thanks everyone, for all your input ! ;)
 
PassMeAGuinness said:
Ok good, but more specifically, the main reason I want this feature, is so that the pictures take up less space on my phones memory (even though I bought the 64gb)
Click to expand...

It sure will, but I really question the need for this.

Set up iCloud Photostream to sync with your computer and you can erase your camera roll every few days and yet still have the original photos at home. I can't imagine that having 100 MB worth of photos at a time is really going to cripple your 64 GB phone.

I hate to see people throw away photo quality when there's no real reason to do it.
 
+1 to Camera+

it was pretty frustrating to hear apple toot their horn about these massive improvements to their camera app when they are still wayyyyy behind apps already in their app store.
 
Small White Car said:
I hate to see people throw away photo quality when there's no real reason to do it.
Click to expand...




Actually, 90% of the folks with iphones take pics to upload to the web, (facebook, twitter, blog pages, etc) -

Do you know what happenes to a pic when you put 8 gazzillion pixels into a 600x 400 space?,
(the pics look like crappola, that's what happens, like trying to put 8 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket).

Not having 3 different res modes for camera and video is HUGE setback,
(one I assume will be addressed in the near future) - ;)
 
Eager Beaver said:
Do you know what happenes to a pic when you put 8 gazzillion pixels into a 600x 400 space?
Click to expand...

This?

400.jpg



What's wrong with that photo?

And that's an 18 MP camera so, according to you theory, that should be way way worse than shrinking an 8 MP photo.
 
Small White Car said:
I can't imagine that having 100 MB worth of photos at a time is really going to cripple your 64 GB phone.
Click to expand...
100MB? You mean just 30-40 iPhone 4S photos? I can understand the thread starter's request. Photos take up a huge amount of storage.

My wife regularly downloads and deletes photos from her iPhone 4, specifically only keeping her favorites, and she still has 3.5GBs of photos on her phone. Photos take up so much space that it's not even practical to include them if you want to use the iCloud backup feature. The free 5GB isn't nearly enough space with photos.

Photo stream isn't great either if you don't have a computer at home that's always on. The iPhones in my household sync to MacBook Pros that are usually off or asleep. iClound syncing really isn't very useful if you don't have a mini or iMac that's left on. And even then, that always-on computer is a familiar computer; it's not the personal machine I'd sync my iOS device to.

You'll have to use a customer camera app or a photo editing app to shrink your images. There are lots out there. Photo editing apps can save the shrunken image back to your camera roll, and then you'll have to go manually delete the larger images after that. I imagine a custom camera app would save it smaller in the first place (no deletion step required).
 
redscull said:
100MB? You mean just 30-40 iPhone 4S photos? I can understand the thread starter's request.
Click to expand...

Yes. If they copy over every time he's on wifi, wouldn't 30-40 be enough? I'm on wifi at least once a day. Maybe not everyone is, but I think it's safe to assume he'd hit some wifi before he got to 200 photos.


redscull said:
Photos take up so much space that it's not even practical to include them if you want to use the iCloud backup feature. The free 5GB isn't nearly enough space with photos.
Click to expand...

Photostream doesn't count against your 5 GB. You get 1,000 photos + 5 GB. It doesn't matter what size the photos are, they count them by number.


redscull said:
My wife regularly downloads and deletes photos from her iPhone 4, specifically only keeping her favorites, and she still has 3.5GBs of photos on her phone.
Click to expand...

It sounds like she's intentionally keeping photos on the phone because she doesn't mind using the space. That's cool, but that doesn't sound like the OP. I'm assuming he'll WANT to be wiping them out frequently since he started a whole thread on how to minimize their impact on his drive.

I'm trying to guess what's best for the OP based on his post. And I think that IF he really wants to minimize space, getting them off his phone as soon as possible is probably what's best for him.
 
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Eager Beaver said:
Actually, 90% of the folks with iphones take pics to upload to the web, (facebook, twitter, blog pages, etc) -

Do you know what happenes to a pic when you put 8 gazzillion pixels into a 600x 400 space?,
(the pics look like crappola, that's what happens, like trying to put 8 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket).

Not having 3 different res modes for camera and video is HUGE setback,
(one I assume will be addressed in the near future) - ;)
Click to expand...

You obviously have NO idea how digital imagery works! The reason you can go on iTunes and watch a 640x360 trailer and it looks AMAZING, and you can shoot a 640x480 video and it looks like crap...the higher quality the source, they better the output....ALWAYS!
 
Eager Beaver said:
Do you know what happenes to a pic when you put 8 gazzillion pixels into a 600x 400 space?,
(the pics look like crappola, that's what happens, like trying to put 8 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket).
Click to expand...

Not exactly. What do you think having choices would do, just pull innermost 600x400 pixels off the sensor? It's going to downsample the 8MP sensor through software, just like web sites and programs that downsample finished images. Same process, just earlier in the chain of events.
 
a backward way of doing this is:

Take a photo.
View it with nothing else on screen.
Hold Home button and Power Switch briefly.
When screen flashes white you just took a screen shot.
That photo is now the native screen res, not the Full Res.
Then delete original photo.

At least this was the case for me with iOS 4 on an iPhone 4
 
Last edited:
Small White Car said:
It sure will, but I really question the need for this.

Set up iCloud Photostream to sync with your computer and you can erase your camera roll every few days and yet still have the original photos at home. I can't imagine that having 100 MB worth of photos at a time is really going to cripple your 64 GB phone.

I hate to see people throw away photo quality when there's no real reason to do it.
Click to expand...



Thanks for your input. Although, I had to disable my photos from going to iCloud, because It was sending silly pictures that I was just taking to mess around with the camera.

I don't want ALL of my pictures going to the cloud, so I had to disable it.

Also, when emailing or text messaging pics, the message gets across quicker (albeit, not by much) when the image size is reduced.

I will have to try camera+ for this then. Unfortunately, I have been spoiled by Gingerbread -

Small White Car, and everyone else, thanks for your input. If I could buy all of you (assuming you're 21 or over, of course) a beer, I would !

Now, If I could just figure out how to delete pics from 'Camera Roll' but leave a copy in another custom album....
 
Last edited:
Small White Car said:
Uh...sure?

EDIT: Hmmm...that might not be the original. I thought I had it on my server but that's all I can find right now.

EDIT 2: Yeah, that one's not the original size. Sorry, it's all I've got here.
Click to expand...



The thread is actually about the user being able to adjust the resolution, so let's talk about how much fuss Apple made about how great this camera is, but yet they failed to upgrade the software to give us the ability to select the res? That's an epic fail, (considering a $25 low end point and shoot has user selected res) -

There will be millions of peeps wanting to take and post vids to their various social accounts, and they are stuck taking 1080 vids, (huge waste of space) -

This failure should be one of the 1st things addressed in the next software updates - ;)
 
PassMeAGuinness said:
Also, when emailing or text messaging pics, the message gets across quicker (albeit, not by much) when the image size is reduced.
Click to expand...

It should be noted that you do have the option to scale images to various sizes when emailing them. The scaling options appear after you press "Send" but before the email is sent.
 
Eager Beaver said:
There will be millions of peeps wanting to take and post vids to their various social accounts, and they are stuck taking 1080 vids, (huge waste of space) -
This failure should be one of the 1st things addressed in the next software updates - ;)
Click to expand...

-This !


r2shyyou said:
It should be noted that you do have the option to scale images to various sizes when emailing them. The scaling options appear after you press "Send" but before the email is sent.
Click to expand...

Thanks ! I was not aware of this.
 
r2shyyou said:
It should be noted that you do have the option to scale images to various sizes when emailing them. The scaling options appear after you press "Send" but before the email is sent.
Click to expand...


How about when txing?
(I do 99% of my e-mailing on my pc, and 100% of my txing on my iphone)
 
I often find sms messages fail with an 8MP photo attached and for a couple of years I have used Snappy when I already know an image is just for texting but want to keep it in my camera roll (it's a bit clunky and needs some love from the developer, but still works)

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/snappy-interactive-camera/id298894828?mt=8

Alternatively just shoot using the camera in 'Messages' which shoots at 768x1024 then type an email address instead of a phone number and hit send
(shoot video with 'messages' and it is recorded as .3gp (AMR Narrowband, H.263) at 176 × 144)
 
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