Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

On the whole I like the way you manage media on your ipod using iTunes. It’s a pretty simple drag and drop affair for music, podcasts videos and playlists… However, I find myself totally frustrated at how photos are handled! You can’t just drag a bunch of photos to your iPod… oh no… you have to go through a very unintuitive sync process. That’s not the worst part though. What I want to use the photo functionality for is to take my favourite shots from my recent outings away with me to show my friends down the pub. I don’t want to keep a full library of photos on there. Once I have some new ones, I want to take the old ones off and put the new ones on. Simple. But because of the needlessly convoluted method of syncing, the easiest way I’ve found to do this is to create a folder called ipod or something and put my latest photos in there for syncing and remove them when I’m done. This way, the next time I sync it will overwrite the photos on the ipod with the empty folder or any new images that I’ve put in there.

Why, Apple, can’t you have a photos option in the list along with Music, Podcasts and Videos and allow me to drag, drop and delete photos as I see fit? It seems totally bonkers that there isn’t one! Even better, why can’t I choose to delete photos from the ipod itself? I can do it with images I’ve saved from Safari, but not my own images… wtf? What makes this feature all the more valuable to me is the fact that I regularly connect my iPod to more than one PC. I mainly do this for charging purposes but occasionally I have a few photos on one computer that I don’t have on another and, most definitely, directory structures are not the same on both computers. This causes yet more issues when I attempt to sync because purchased items are licensed to a computer and as such causes errors to be thrown up, as you’d expect… but for some reason it also causes iTunes to have a fit and attempt a backup.. of your whole iPod. That takes aaaaages! I only want to delete a hand full of photos for Christs sake!

For such a clever interface between hardware and software, photos on iPod and iTunes seems to be a massive flaw. Up until recently you could use your iPod as a mass storage device and as such drag photos to it in explorer and that was fine so it seems like the least Apple could have done, when they took this feature away, is integrate a decent alternative into iTunes. Alas… maybe we’ll get it in the future…. maybe not.