Harry – Page 2 – Appotography

How Do I Delete Photos From My iPhone?

Deleting multiple photos from your iPhone does not seem to be exactly straightforward for many users: this is a question we are asked often by iPhone photographers. There are actually at least four methods of deleting multiple photos that are worth mentioning: the first can be done directly from the Camera Roll and is perfect when you need to delete a few dozens of images; the others require your iPhone to be connected to your computer (Windows or Mac).

Method 1: Delete photos from the iPhone Camera Roll

1. Launch your iPhone’s Camera Roll.
2. In the top bar, you should see a curved arrow icon – tap the icon.
3. You can now select as many photos as you want in the Camera Roll.
4. When you have selected all the photos you want to delete, tap the Delete button.

Method 2: Delete photos through Itunes

Sometimes, you have so many photos in your iPhone that even the method above becomes too time-consuming. A simple way to get rid of all the photos is to delete them while your iPhone is connected to iTunes on your PC. When you transfer the photos to your PC, iTunes will ask if you want to keep the photos on your iPhone or if you want to remove them.

1. Connect the iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes
2. Go to Devices, then select your iPhone
3. Click on the Photos tab
4. Uncheck the Synch Photos option and click on Remove Photos
5. Click Apply. WARNING: This will remove all your photos!

Method 3: Windows 7 – Connect your iPhone to your computer, and access the photos directly

Simply put, use your iPhone like an external HDD.

On Windows 7 (should work also on Vista):

1. Connect the iPhone to your computer.
2. Go to My Computer, and you should see the iPhone device icon.
3. Double click on the icon, and you should see your photos directory.
4. You can now delete or do whatever you want with the photos, as if they were on your computer HDD.

Method 4: Using Mac OS X Preview

Many Mac users do not know about this, but when you connect your iPhone to your Mac, you can move, delete, and access the photos on your iPhone through Preview. The tool is actually quite powerful, and ignored by some that (reasonably) tend to use only iPhoto to access the photos on their iPhone.

1. Connect the iPhone to your Mac.
2. Open Preview, then click the File menu and select Import From [iPhone Name].
3. An easy to use window will open, where you are free to play with your photos and delete them if you need to.

If you want to delete photos from your iCloud stream, please check our latest article, available here.

If you have other methods to share, please comment!

Also, if this article was helpful, do not forget to follow us on Twitter or on Facebook – it really helps us!

New Hipstmatic’s Terms of Service: Why Companies Can’t Be Your Friend

A few days ago, Synthetic, developers of Hipstamatic, released a new version of their popular and award winning application. We love Hipstamatic for the quality of the filters provided, it truly is a good app.

The last release of Hipstamatic came together with a new Terms of Service agreement, and some of the users, instead of skipping through it and pressing the “I Agree” button, decided to read it and did not like some of the points contained in the document. To be brief, by accepting the agreement you will give Hipstamatic full rights on the photos you upload to their servers (not those you keep on your iPhone). By full rights, I mean they can – just to make an example – use your hi-res photos and sell them, and you will get nothing.

Here is the interesting bit in the new TOS:

“You grant to Hipstamatic the unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual fully-paid and royalty-free right and license to host, use, copy, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, sublicense, display, perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, modify, make derivative works from, retitle, reformat, translate, archive, store, cache or otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content to which you have contributed, for any purpose whatsoever, in any and all formats; on or through any and all media, software, formula or medium now known or hereafter known; and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed and to advertise, market and promote same.”

And again:

“You retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to Hipstamatic.com, you hereby grant Hipstamatic.com a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable right and license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the Website and Hipstamatic.com’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media now known or hereafter developed.”

Many users were irritated by these bits, also because in order to download the new free pack of filters in Hipstamatic you are forced to agree to the above terms – even though downloading an add-on and giving full rights on your photos to a third party are thankfully usually two very different things.

Synthetic, a bit like it happened with Instagram’s guys, were very fast to answer their users on Facebook, and they did it by writing a sweet sounding – more hippie than hipster – declaration of love and purity of sentiments that seems to have moved the hearts of some, and enraged others.

“Let me assure you that we have no intention of doing anything evil with your prints ever. We’re really just a group of guys, and good ones at that — there’s six of us now, one recently added. We are not some big faceless megacorp looking to leech all the money we can out of your art. We made Hipstamatic because we love photographs, and our community is our greatest treasure because of the awesome things they’ve done with our app. I promise that we are not out to screw you. We love you guys. :(“

The rest of their post, which you can read on Facebook (thanks to our visitor JonnyGerman for reporting the post in one of his comments), basically states that the “necessary” nasty bits apply only to people uploading photos to their servers. Also, the developers added that they are hearing the feedback of their users and they have now hired “expensive lawyers” to take care of things.

The first criticism against this kind of answer is, hopefully, obvious. All the babbling about “we are good guys”, “we love you”, “we are not a faceless megacorp” is completely out of place and pathetic when you represent a company offering a service to your users, dealing with critical private data and precious (for many, not for everybody, according to the comments on Facebook) photos of these individuals. Between friends, you do not need a Terms of Service Agreement. Between friends, you do not need a Terms of Service where you grant yourself ownership on the work of your other friend. Hipstamatic might very well be run by a team of “six artists” (once again, from the aforementioned Facebook post), but these artists are also skilled businessmen: they are currently running an app that has been top ranking in the App Store for a long time, and this means with no doubt millions of dollars of almost net profits, once you take away Apple’s 30% on their sales. Not a megacorporate, but a very healthy, profitable, and attractive company. On the outside, in their Facebook posts, Hipstamatic’s developers might say they are your friends, but this did not prevent them from slapping into their Terms of Service a clause that is simply unacceptable for anybody valuing their work even a tiny bit. Show your kind face to your users, and put the nasty clauses into the Terms of Service is a way of conducting business that has nothing to do with being artists or being good guys: in today’s market, it simply means you are an astute and world-savvy businessman.

And let’s even say you buy their excuses, because you want to, you think they are nice and friendly and their app is cool. You trust these “six artists” and you believe that they just hacked together a Terms of Service in their free time and threw it at you without thinking twice. This is even more unacceptable, as I wrote in my post about Instagram. A company like Hipstamatic might already be worth millions of dollars to a potential buyer; acquiring rights on potentially million of photos of users that maybe just agreed to the TOS without even reading it (don’t we do that all the time? and it’s all our fault) will make the value of their assets soar. So, the “six artists” might sell their company in the future. Or maybe the company will go bankrupt – you know, they say another Internet bubble is soon to explode, and we live in uncertain times – and another company will purchase all their assets. At that point, guess what will happen to your photos? They will fall into the hands of this other company, and you will be able to do absolutely nothing about it, because by agreeing to the TOS, you gave Hipstamatic full “transferable right and license to use”.

Please think about this, understand what kind of crazy, offensive uses could be made of your photos if you agree to such a TOS, and I am sure you can’t do anything else but being at least disturbed by it.

In the end, I have no doubt that Hipstamatic will revise their Terms of Service, giving us proof that the nasty clause in their TOS was far from being “necessary” (again, from the Facebook post) – it was just there to cover the six artists’ backs, to the detriment of the thousands (millions?) of artists that are using their application. Am I right? We will see.

As users of these apps we must always be careful and smart, and remember that as nice or as friendly these developers might seem, they are there trying to make money out of you. There is nothing wrong in that, but the relationship between company and client can be a good one if it is based on honesty or at least on a well-balanced TOS, not on half-assed attempts at taking away as many rights as possible from the users.

I hate to quote myself because I do not think I am a good writer, but it is just sad that the ending I wrote to my piece about Instagram applies perfectly here:

“…These users should have read the TOS, so in the end they were technically responsible for their choice of using Instagram and uploading their photos. But as a small professional software developer and website owner, I like to think about my potential users as people I must protect, and I must know that almost nobody, these days, will read the TOS. Maybe photographers are not good businessmen or scrupulous Internet users, but they are often very passionate about their work. It’s their art. And this deserves respect and assumption of responsibility – especially if you are a “starter” planning to make a living out of your users’ art.”

Be proud of what you do, and do not give it away for nothing – unless you want to.

The Problem with Instagram

We liked Instagram enough. It is a no-frills, simple application which is already extremely popular among iPhone photographers. It is obvious that the guys at Instagram, after they raised consistent funds for their project (“We raised a $500,000 seed round from Andreessen-Horowitz and Baseline Ventures”, they write on their website’s FAQ), followed the minimalist approach that has always characterized Mac platforms, and that has now become a distinctive feature of a lot of iPhone and Mac apps, but also of online applications. The developers of the hugely popular Basecamp, a web-based project management tool which brilliantly exemplifies this tendency, even wrote a small book on the topic, “Rework”, which seems to have become a must-read for startups and small entrepreneurs (or “starters” as they are called in the book). While some may hate the book, I think it is a fast read that could be worth your time and money (or if you prefer to go the cheap way, just read the authors’ blog), also to understand how a lot of these young companies try to work and market their products. In brief, the authors of “Rework” propose a way of doing business based on building as-simple-as-possible and easy to use products, and trying to avoid complications along the way.

By all means, Burbn Inc., the development team behind Instagram, seems to have followed this philosophy – at least for the phase 1 of their project. Instagram is lacking a lot of features that one would find in other apps, but they built their app with the features they considered necessary for most of their users (or for the average user), and launched it as fast as possible, after a beta period.

And Instagram is free, for God’s sake, so what have you got to lose, right? This is what a lot of Instagram users must have thought, us included, and you could see the community associated with the product growing exponentially, day by day. Enter Chrysti and Chris Prakoso, Instagram users and the heroes of this post, who noticed something peculiar in the Terms of Service agreement of the application:

“By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram and other users a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly (“private”) will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services. Instagram and/or other Users may copy, print or display publicly available Content outside of the Instagram Services, including without limitation, via the Site or third party websites or applications (for example, services allowing Users to order prints of Content or t-shirts and similar items containing Content).”

Which basically meant that anybody could grab your photos on Instagram and do with them whatever they wanted, including selling prints or using them to decorate a sleek collection of underwear for dogs. Some other parts of the TOS seemed to mitigate this a tiny bit, but the loophole was there. After I have no idea how many users (some say 1 million users are already using Instagram), Chrysti and Chris were the first ones to actually read the TOS, or at least the first users with the willpower to read and understand the TOS. A small discussion of mostly concerned users and professionals with dozens of their photos already uploaded into Instagram’s servers followed and added interesting nuances to the matter (you can find the discussion created by Chris and Christy here). After a few hours, surprise! – Instagram’s TOS was updated to remove the paragraph above, and everybody was happy.

But I am not. Such a fundamental change in the TOS in a matter of a few hours since a user and some important blogs first reported the issue is at least suspicious. It almost feels like the developers were aware of this loophole in their TOS, but tried to keep things as simple as possible for themselves, for as long as possible. Nothing easier for a “starter” in the online application business than to ignore any possible copyright lawsuits between members of their community in the first weeks (or months, maybe) of activity. Then, in case a smarter user notices and makes his concerns public, you always have plan B ready: a pre-written and more acceptable TOS, and a chance to look like you listen to your customers’ concerns.

Of course, there is also another possible explanation. Instagram developers really did not know what they were doing when they wrote their TOS; maybe they grabbed your average safe TOS and threw it into the application and into their sleek, minimalist website. Possible. But not better. As a user, this could make you doubt Instagram’s dedication and commitment in providing an environment that is respectful of the users and of their media. If the developers did not take the time to review their TOS, is it possible that they are taking other dangerous shortcuts, maybe in their code? And if you were one of the investors that gave them $500,000 to create and manage the application, would you feel comfortable having them running the company? This is exactly the kind of mistake that in these days, where discussions about privacy and ownership of your online “things” make the first page of major newspapers, would call for a resignation from the person directly responsible for it. And a big public apology, maybe here.

1 million users, each sharing at least 10 photos (a very conservative estimate; in most cases, dozens of photos). This means that for nearly two months, millions of photos were in the land of copyright wilderness, ready to be used in ways that I am sure a consistent percentage of Instagram users did not want them to be used.

Yes, you are right. These users should have read the TOS, so in the end they were technically responsible for their choice of using Instagram and uploading their photos. But as a small professional software developer and website owner, I like to think about my potential users as people I must protect, and I must know that almost nobody, these days, will read the TOS. Maybe photographers are not good businessmen or scrupulous Internet users, but they are often very passionate about their work. It’s their art. And this deserves respect and assumption of responsibility – especially if you are a “starter” planning to make a living out of your users’ art.

Edit (11/07/2010): Chris, the Instagram user that reported the issue, was kind enough to point out that user Chrysti was the one that actually led him to read the TOS with greater attention. We updated the article to reflect this and to link to their websites.