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Photoblogging from the iPhone

(This was going to be a post about some iPhone photos I took at Westfield recently, but started to become an iPhone post instead! Photos at the bottom…)

So here at mge towers we’re still devoid of connection to the real world, er, I mean The Internet. My iPhone has been pushed to the limit in the meantime and has needed charging a couple of times a day! It’s still by far the most incredible gadget I’ve ever owned, despite the numerous shortcomings (copy & paste, MMS, SMS forwarding…). It’s as a ‘take everywhere’ camera that it’s been proving most useful lately, though. Here’s a little run down of the apps that get the most use when it comes to photography and blogging from my iPhone.

I generally take photos with a view to putting them through the Camerabag app, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. For a couple of quid its trenendous value. You can load any iPhone photo into it and it will apply an effect of your choosing, including Holga and Lomo looks, two mono conversions and a number of other retro colour effects.

After taking my photos and tweaking them, I want to upload and share them with the world. I can either download them to my Mac and then upload to somewhere like Flickr or Facebook or, especially useful when like me you’re currently being denied your digital umbilical cord, there are a number of apps that will upload directly from your iPhone. Obviously you can upload directly to Facebook using their own app, but for Flickr (and other photo hosting sites) there are many third party apps available, most of which can upload to multiple sources. I tried ShoZu and Exposure (now renamed Darkslide) but it seemed to me they were downsizing the photos before upload. Apparently this is a limitation of the iPhone system software, although having said that I did find one app that does seem to upload full size iPhone photos – PixelPipe.

Pixelpipe first requires you to set up what sites (and accounts) you want to upload to. I just wanted to send to Flickr but the list of other sites it supports is huge, including WordPress, Moveable Type, Blogger, Bebo, Photobox, smugmug, Youtube, Vimeo… If you can upload images to it, Pixelpipe seems able to connect one way or another. I can set tags for it to automatically apply to all uploads to Flickr (such as ‘iPhone’), give any images from my Camera Roll a title, description and individual tags, then choose which to upload.

Finally, I might want to blog those images somewhere. Now, although Pixelpipe can upload to WordPress (which runs this blog), I’m using the WordPress app in the absence of my usual high speed onramp to the information superhighway as it allows me to draft a post without access to the cellular data network (such as when I’m on the tube, as I am now!).

On my desktop Mac I generally create posts with third party software called Marsedit, which allows for almost complete layout control of my post, as much as if I signed into my WordPress control panel to post. However, there is no version of Marsedit for iPhone as yet, and the WordPress app (which as far as I can tell is not ‘official’ as such) does not have as much control, particularly where image size and placement is concerned. As such, all the images I want to post are going to appear at the bottom, instead of in re midst of the text.

Mind you, I’m not a seasoned mobile WordPress blogger so perhaps there is a better way to post on-the-go that does allow for more formatting control. If you know of a way please let me know in the comments for this post!

And there we have it: photography, blogging and the iPhone – at least according to me 😉

And now finally, have a gander at what was supposed to be the focus of this post, some photos I took while wandering the hallowed halls of London’s newest church to capitalism, Westfield.

By myglasseye

I'm a Glasgow-born stills photographer and camera operator living and working in London, UK. As well as cameras I'm into writing, gaming, general geekery and beers by Brew Dog.

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