Using an Apple iPod photo with Nokia Lifeblog

I recently played with an iPod photo to see how it would work with Lifeblog.

I installed the iPod photo software on my Windows XP machine. This updated my iTunes. The cool thing is that on the PC you don't need a helper app, such as iPhoto (which doesn't exist on the PC) or Adobe anything (which is what is suggested by Apple). You can point iTunes to a folder and it will suck up the photos from there (nested too).

Needless to say, I pointed iTunes to LifeblogData/Datastore/Files, the folder that has all my data (all neatly organized by month I should say, which came in handy later on). After loading my songs, it started (very slowly) optimizing the images for the iPod (don't know why), and then it took a while to load 4300 or so images (about 4 G) from my Lifeblog.

Yes, it worked. Better yet, I could view all the images on the iPod all together or in their subfolders which - yes! - Lifeblog had politely organized by month! How cool is that? My images were all properly rotated as in Lifeblog; though it wasn’t clear to me how the iPod was sorting my pictures, since some were out of order.

To see how well the integration worked, I transferred a new image to Lifeblog from the phone. It was transferred (updated) to the iPod when I placed it in the cradle - automatically! But, I still need to figure out some other things, since when I rotated an image after it had been uploaded to the iPod, the image wasn’t updated on the iPod side, even though it was on the PC. So, I'm still trying to figure out the synch there (isn’t that always the issue!).

In any case, this was so cool!

And since the iPod photo is only a passive device - all you can do with the photo is show it in different ways, there's no manipulation or futzing - it's a perfect companion for Lifeblog aficionados! I have my whole Lifeblog now on my iPod and I take the TV cable to bore the beejesus out of my family, showing them all my pics.