The iPhone Takes Pictures But Won't Give Them Back

I took a picture with my iPhone.

It wasn't that great but it was good enough that I wanted to work with it a little bit. So far, most of the photos I've taken with my iPhone have shared two things in common. They tend to be a little bit dark and a little bit blurry. I've had some success by arranging the subject to face the light and when I can get myself to hold it very, very still I've had some good results. There's no flash of course, so there should at least be a gamma or brightness adjustment built into the photo editor which is currently limited to resize and crop.

The default method for getting a photo from an untethered iPhone to another computer is to email it. It didn't work the first time I tried it. The message was apparently placed in the outgoing queue as evidenced by the 'Sending' status bar at the very bottom of the email screen. It was in the Sending mode for over three hours. During that time I passed through and connected with two different wireless networks and the EDGE network. No joy. I also tethered it to my laptop and requested synchronization - ok, that had a low probablity of success but until we try how will we know?

I sent a few other messages in the meantime and they didn't seem to be impeded by the stuck outgoing message. That's a good sign.

So I finally gave up on that message. It was still listed in the Outbox so I deleted it from there but that didn't clear it from the outgoing queue. I know UNIX (the basis of OS X) is extremely insistent about outgoing email and I am not sure what would have happened if I had the patience to let it continue. Instead of waiting indefinitely I did a complete power down. Hold down the on/off button at the top right corner while pressing the home button, bottom center. When I powered back up, the message was no longer in the queue. If it does happens again (and why wouldn't it?) I will try cycling the power without deleting it from the Outbox first. Maybe in that case it would have queued up again instead of simply going away. I emailed the photo again and on the second try it was delivered within seconds.

I noticed one pitfall while editing a contact's photo. There is a 'Take Photo' option and although it's there at a convenient moment which I think is great, if you do supply the photo this way, then you can't do anything else with it. There's no email option associated with it, nor does it appear in the Camera Roll.

The iPhone's camera is really good at taking pictures of business cards. Place the card face up on a well lit surface - hold very, very still - and snap, you have a permanent record of all the information on the card in a second.

Postscript: It happened again, an outbound message got stuck in the "Sending" mode. After a few minutes an error message popped up and it placed a copy of the message in the Outbox for me. This time I did not delete it from the Outbox but instead only cycled the power. When the iPhone came back on, the message went out successfully. The root cause may have to do with the outbound SMTP connection failing the first time. There appears to be no retry.