We love the convenience of taking high-quality photos and video on the go with an iPhone 4 or fourth-generation iPod touch -- but unfortunately, Apple still hasn’t provided a way to wirelessly sync this media back to our computers, or even a way to back up precious photos in the cloud so you don’t have to import them so frequently. Thanks to the $1.99 universal CameraSync app from Homegrown Software Ltd., this is now as easy as simply opening the app and letting it do its thing.
After opening CameraSync on your iOS device, you’ll be greeted with a list of cloud-based services you can use to store your images and video – among them are popular choices such as Dropbox, Box.net, Amazon S3, MobileMe iDisk, Flickr or the FTP server of your choice. The developers of CameraSync recommend Dropbox, which is the easiest way to upload your media and magically sync it to every computer or device that you have the client software installed. Best of all, you’ll be able to easily view these files from the Dropbox app on iOS or Android devices.
To link CameraSync to your account, simply tap on the Dropbox icon and enter your credentials in the form of an e-mail address and password. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, tap “Create an account” to start one – your first 2GB of storage is absolutely free, so there’s no reason not to give it a try. When finished, tap the Link button and proceed to Sync Options.
On the next screen, you’ll have the choice of syncing all existing photos on your iOS device or only new photos you take from this point forward, as well as options to have CameraSync create a folder on Dropbox for your media, or choosing one of your own. When you’ve made your choices, tap Done to proceed to the Settings screen.
After setting up your Dropbox account, you’ll wind up in the Settings pane. From here you can add additional accounts to upload content to, as well as specify what type of content to sync, and how. CameraSync has left no stone unturned and gives you maximum flexibility to decide how you want to handle your media.
If you tap on an existing account, you’ll find three options: Edit Account, Label Account and Delete Account. The first lets you change your Dropbox link to another account, while the second allows you to change the account name – useful for giving a distinctive name to an FTP account, for example. Finally, you have the option to remove your account entirely from CameraSync.
Back in the main Settings pane, there are three options under “Content to Sync” which can be toggled on or off: Sync Photos, Sync Videos and Sync Camera Imports. The first two give you the choice to upload only one type of media should you choose to do so – you can speed up your syncing by turning off videos, for instance. The third option allows you to ignore media imported to your Camera Roll, which includes files saved from other apps or imported from a digital camera with the iPad Camera Connection Kit.
The next section, “Sync Settings”, allows you to control the size of your uploaded photos with four choices: Full resolution (which offers the maximum quality by uploading your original images), Large (maximum size of 1600 x 1600), Medium (maximum size of 1200 x 1200) or Small (maximum size of 800 x 800). If you’re concerned about having good backups of your iOS device media, you’ll want to choose Full here.
There are also three options for choosing how your sync is displayed: “Show Percentage” gives you a visual cue as to how far along your sync is, while “Show Icon Label” puts a badge on the app’s icon, displaying how many files are left to go; “Disable Screen Sleep” allows you to keep the display awake during upload so you can see its progress. Finally, there’s an option to Reset Uploaded Memory, which will force a new sync of your data in case something goes wrong.
Once you leave the Settings pane by tapping Done, you’ll see the main CameraSync screen populate with your Camera Roll media and a sync will begin – as each file is uploaded, it will drop from the top of the screen into the open box at the bottom to indicate success. To stop an upload in progress, tap the small white octagon, which will then change to an inverse arrow. Tap the icon to make the upload continue; you can also leave the app and return later to finish uploading.
From now on, every time you open the app, CameraSync will look for new media on your iOS device and upload whatever it finds to Dropbox (as well as other services you add). If you delete a file from your Dropbox folder, the app will ignore the deleted file and not attempt to upload it again.
CameraSync is also an all or nothing proposition – while you can control which type of content you want to upload, you can’t choose which photos or videos get uploaded. If it’s new, it gets send to the cloud; if it’s already been synced before, it is ignored. This makes the app incredibly easy to use, since every time you open CameraSync, it does what it’s programmed to do without overthinking the process.
There are a few limitations, however. At present, you can only use one account per service – which means you can’t add two or more Dropbox accounts, or use more than one MobileMe iDisk at a time. However, if you set up two or more different types of storage, CameraSync will upload your media to both at the same time, which is quite handy. Also, the app is only designed to sync one way – from the app to your cloud storage, not the other way around.
Finally, CameraSync uses its own naming scheme on your photos and videos, in the form of the year, month, date and time when it was taken. That means if you use iPhoto to directly import photos from your device, you may get duplicates if you choose to import CameraSync’s exported files as well. Thankfully, the app does include all of the image and GPS data, which is why the app is required to ask for your permission before using your location information when it first launches.
Once you’ve used CameraSync to upload media from your iOS device, you’ll no doubt be wondering if there’s some way to automatically import those pictures and videos directly into iPhoto without manual intervention. As it turns out, the developers have you covered with an AppleScript that makes short work of this task, as long as you’re using Dropbox or iDisk for uploading.
After doing your initial sync with CameraSync, download a tiny script from the developer’s website. Open a Finder window and browse to the /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ folder of your Macintosh HD (not your user folder). Drag and drop the “add - import into iPhoto.scpt” file to this location.
From your Dropbox folder, control-click on your CameraSync folder (which should be named after your particular device, assuming you didn’t change it earlier) and select Services > Folder Actions Setup. You’ll now see a list of available scripts -- select the one you just added and click the Attach button. Finally, make sure “Enable Folder Actions” is selected and that both your folder and script are checked, then quit Folder Actions Setup.
Now, any new photos added to your Dropbox folder by CameraSync will automatically get imported into iPhoto the next time it’s launched, without you having to lift a finger – or plug your iOS device into the computer.
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