Loading photos

[tarantulakeeper]

I am thinking of upgrading to a Tungston E from a Zire particularly for the photo storage. My question is regarding the actual uploading of the photos.
1) I have a sony digital and use iphoto and Photoshop for editing/storage on my laptop. How are photos uploaded to the E?
2) What size photo will the E take? I realize the larger the picture the more memory is used but can I load higher than 640 x 320?
3) Is the packaged Palm photo the only app necessary to store/view photos?
4) Will palm photo app sort and store photos in different folders or are they all just kept in one large library? Is there an add-on app that will do this?

Thanks for any and all insights. John

and yes, I keep lots of tarantulas. :D

[Telyx]

You can upload photos using Palm Desktop's "Photos" component, but the best way is to get a card reader and drag-and-drop or copy/paste photos onto the card. You can create "albums" (like categories) in RAM, but the Palm Photos app on the Palm only reads the /DCIM folder and any of its subfolders on a card. You can't create categories on the card if you use Palm Photos.

There are many add-on photo viewing apps--AcidImage, SplashPhoto (both commercial), JPEGView (still in development, but the latest version is free), VFSi (free)--these all view JPEGs in their native state. Firepad Image Viewer is nice because it lets you view immense pictures, but you have to run your pictures through a converter and the viewer isn't free. (The converter will function if you don't register it, but the delay gets long fast.) I use VFSi for photos and Firepad's viewer for maps.

I'm not sure if AcidImage or SplashPhoto are limited as to how big an image they can display. VFSi's latest version can't display photos larger than 1MB. Firepad's viewer will let you view huge images--I can't remember how many feet x how many feet you can view--but their compression is much less efficient than JPEG for color photos. The Palm Photos app will resize any photos so the largest dimension fits the screen, so you might as well resize or crop your photos before you load them--320x320 square will fill the screen.

A good combo for storing images on your Palm would be a card reader (for quick loading of an expansion card), one of the above-mentioned "native JPEG" viewers (so you can organize your photos into "category" folders), and the freeware program IrfanView, which makes resizing and cropping terribly easy.

[tarantulakeeper]

Thanks for your reply. I need to research some of the technical things you mentioned and I'll return. John