Upload and Manage your iPhone photos with…. Oh, you can’t!!

REVISIT: I’ve commented in the past about the iPhone’s inability to allow manual management of folders, something that was perfectly possible on my T-Mobile Vario 2, many moons ago. So…. Where are we now?

Sadly, still the same place. Below are a few things I’ve tried, but firstly, what do I want to do?

Well…. I want to take my photo roll, and:

• Delete unwanted photos
• Crop/straighten/brighten wanted photos
• Rename them into a sequence (eg. beach 01.jpg, beach 02.jpg
• Put them in a folder (eg. “Beach”)
• Sync them to my PC, for offline archiving

So. Where are we?

iOS5
Better than it was. You can auto contrast, crop, and rotate (but not straighten). Youcan create folders, but you can’t move them there. Photos moved to a folder still remain in your Camera Roll, and deleting them there will delete them everywhere. The Photo Stream allows syncing to other devices, but still, you can’t delete them elsewhere – it’s like a great unedited Fickr stream. So, not a solution.

Dropbox
Ah, the leader of file sync, with an iPhone app. Surely this must work?
Well.. No. You can create a folder in a chosen location, and bulk upload photos there. Fantastic! But you can’t rename them, so you then have to rename them on the PC afterwards. Fail.

Sugarsync
My favourite file syncer, since it doesn’t restrict me to the “My Dropbox” folder.
In contrast to Dropbox, you can rename files. But you can’t create folders, or bulk upload.

Box.net
You can upload – one at a time. And you can’t create folders or rename files. Fail.

MyPics
This is a great photo sharing/sync tool with strong Picasa support. It supports renaming and queuing files offline, uploading to Picasa, and creation of albums. However, you have to go to the PC and manually enable syncing of those web albums in order to download them to your PC, and be mindful of any accidental online sharing via Picasa Web Albums.

 

So… At the moment, to get where I want to be, I need to enable Sugarsync sharing with my Dropbox Photos folder, so that I can edit my photos in iOS5, upload them in bulk with dropbox, then rename them in Sugarsync. Um. Great.