Apple does a very good job integrating support for downloading photos and images from iPhone and digital cameras using iPhoto. But sometimes all you want is to pull a couple of photos quick and easy. Or (and this is truly unbelievable!) you happened to have no iLife on your Mac.

Here comes Image Capture to the rescue. Image Capture is a handy application that is a part of every Mac OS X installation. You can find it under Applications in Finder. Image Capture provides no tools to organize images into albums, but it does help with retrieving images from iPhone, digital cameras and even scanners. And it does it well.

To get photos from an iPhone, first, connect it to your Mac. Then start Image Capture application either from Finder’s Applications folder or by searching Spotlight:

Once running, Image Capture recognizes iPhone and displays its name in the title together with showing iPhone icon on the left:

On this first screen you can change download location; choose to run additional tasks like cropping or building a slideshow; and change options. Once you decided ‘where to’ and ‘how’, the last remaining question is ‘what’. To download everything, click Download All button. Otherwise Download Some… will open a browser window, where you can make your image selection:

Hit Download button. You are done!

P.S. Did you know that Image Capture can be used to monitor a remote location? The answer is in the Help.

Today Apple released an update for iTunes software – iTunes 9. Many new and really great features were added, but one thing remains the same. There is still no support for synchronizing high resolution photos from your computer to iPhone or iPod touch.

During synchronization iTunes performs image “optimization”. In reality images are resized to iPhone screen resolution of 480 by 320 pixels. This is probably sufficient for on-screen viewing (unless you want to zoom in on details), but even for sharing via email 480 x 320 is not that huge.

There is a couple of ways to workaround this limitation. They are not perfect, but lets work with what we have…

Email

If you have email account configured on your device, simply email high resolution photos to yourself. Then on iPhone

1. Start Mail application;
2. Navigate to the message with the photos:

   

3. Tap on attachment icons to download images:

   

4. Tap and hold on an image until prompted for actions:

   

5. Choose Save;

Your full resolution images will be saved to “Camera Roll” (“Saved Photos” on iPod touch).

Mobile Safari

If you have your high resolution images published on a website, you can save them to Camera Roll from Safari using the same tap and hold steps as above.

Emoji is a Japanese word literally meaning “picture character” or emoticon. In Japan mobile handsets have built-in support for Emoji characters and are capable of sending and receiving wireless messages containing them. [Check Wikipedia for more details.] iPhone too supports Emoji starting with firmware 2.2, but by default it is disabled on units sold outside of Japan.

There is a lot of information available on the Internet discussing different ways to enable Emoji on iPhone, but arguably the easiest is with a little help from “Spell Number – get emoji…” free iPhone app [App Store link]. This app in addition to its spelling bee smarts contains what’s known in software industry as Easter Egg and enables Emoji keyboard.

The steps below do not require jailbreaking and were verified to work on iPhone and iPod touch with firmware from 2.2.1 to 3.0.1.

Here is what to do:

• Install the application from the App Store;
• Start “Spell Number” and
• Enter the following: 91929394.56 91929394.59;
• Return to Home Screen by pressing Home Button;
• Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese;
• Turn ON the slider for Emoji.

Now start any application accepting text input – Notes, SMS or iHagaki Postcards, tap on a text input control to bring keyboard on, then tap on World Icon until you see Emoji pictographs.

That’s it!

A word of warning: SMS containing Emoji are perfectly readable when sent to iPhone users, but people with other mobile handsets most probably will see some garbled text instead. The same is true for Mail app: Emoji characters in email messages are readable when viewed on iPhone, but other email clients, including Mac’s Mail.app, Mobile Me and Gmail, do not handle them correctly.