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Despite the advances in technology, there’s still one common complaint about camera phones: How can I get my pictures off the phone? The truth is, there are plenty of ways.
Sharing Pictures
Ideally, your pictures aren’t just for you to admire. You’d like to share them with others. Here are three ways to do so.
Carrier services:
Some cell phone carriers offer their own picture messaging services. Sprint’s Picture Mail is the most robust, enabling you to maintain online photo albums, edit and enhance photos, organize Picture Mail groups, and order prints that you can have delivered to your home. You can also arrange to pick up your prints at select retailers, including Ritz Camera and Sam’s Club.
Verizon Wireless’ Picture & Video Messaging service offers similar features, as well as unlimited storage in your PixPlace Web account for $1.99 a month.
E-mail:
If a full-fledged picture messaging service isn’t right for you, or if your carrier doesn’t offer one, you can always send your pictures via e-mail. It’s also a good option if you’re sharing pictures with other cell phone users who don’t subscribe to your carrier.
Photo blogging:
Camera phone blogs, or moblogs (for mobile blogs) were one of the first applications for camera phone users. Sites such as Textamerica enabled users to upload images directly from their camera phones to their sites. Today, all kinds of photo blogs and social-networking sites support camera phone uploads, including Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook.
Memory card
Along with the additional storage that memory cards afford, you can also use them to print your photos. Most photo printers accept a wide range of memory cards. And if your phone accepts only miniSD or microSD cards, you can purchase an adapter that will fit into a standard SD slot.
The following chart provides basic guidelines regarding what kind of output you can expect from different camera phone resolutions. Your camera phone’s output quality may vary.
| Resolutions |
VGA |
1.3 MP |
2MP |
3MP |
5MP |
| Optimal Output Medium |
On your cell phone |
On a Web page or
3x5 print |
4x6 print |
5x7 print |
8x10
print |
Printing Pictures
With the earliest camera phones, printing your pictures wasn’t really an option and to be fair, the quality of printed images would have been so subpar it would hardly be worth the effort. The process was too convoluted and the image quality wasn’t worth the trouble. Now that cameras with 2MP and higher are becoming the norm, you can get decent-looking prints, and you have a few options for doing so.
PictBridge:
This technology allows compatible digital cameras and camera phones to print directly to a PictBridge-compatible printer via a USB cable. Aside from taking the PC and photo printing software out of the equation, PictBridge is brand independent, so you don’t have to worry about using, say, a Nokia phone with an HP printer. PictBridge-compatible camera phones include the Samsung M610 and the LG Fusic LX550. You can see a complete list of all PictBridge-compatible devices here.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth not only allows you to wear those weird-looking wireless headsets, it also supports wireless printing to a compatible printer. If your printer doesn’t support Bluetooth out of the box, you may be able to attach a Bluetooth wireless printer adapter. And as we mentioned earlier, make sure your cell phone supports the Bluetooth Printing Profile (BPP). In some cases, you can even send photos stored on your camera phone to another compatible Bluetooth device such as a computer or another cell phone. You just need to look for File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support on your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to be able to perform this function.
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