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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

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Jerome Marot

Well-known member
This is just a quick try to see whether pictures can be posted from an iPad.

625

It works... but it took me several efforts to reduce the file size to be accepted by the forum.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I had a look, but €4,50 for such a simple single-featured app seems quite overpriced. I can use Affinity photo to the same effect or even pixelmator (but not pixelmator photo).

Still, iOS automatically suggests to resize pictures when emailing them. Why it does not when posting to the web or "sharing" through application is a bit silly.
 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member
It is FREE to use. Little annoyances to put up with unless you pay, but worth it. Far quicker and more effortless than Affinity Photo or Photoshop for me unless I need critical resizing and sharpening. I post mostly from my iPad. But to each their own. Only a suggestion.


——
 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member
Not, it is not. It requires that I link my unique advertising i.d. to their advertising merchants. That may appear to be "free" to the casual user but not to me.


WHAT? I have no idea what you are referring to. I downloaded it and used it. I’ve never connected it to anything. The only thing that I approved was for it to have access to my Photos folder which is essential for opening files and resaving to the same location. Oh well. ?‍♂️
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I simply mail the image to myself and a second later I have the reduced size image. Nothing could be faster!

Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
WHAT? I have no idea what you are referring to.

Come to think of it, maybe the above dialog was only shown to me to comply with Europe's GPDR and was not displayed for you?

The application tracks usage to display advertisements and needs to inform the users but only within the EU.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Imagine if EU rules applied to Russian hackers!

“This is to inform you that the FSB has been monitoring your political preferences purely for dispassionate leveraging of bias towards Donald Trump as he needs all the resources to match expectations for ROI to Deutsche Bank and other investors.”

“Furthermore, information collected from recording keystrokes on your computer will only be used to influence elections and not to harm sustainable ecosystems of fracking and gas export”.


Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
When I say that I don't want to be tracked, I am reasonably serious. Some people treat me as if I was wearing a tinfoil hat, except the people who actually work in the field. If google was a country, it would want #120 in the world list per gdp. That money does not exist without a reason. Just saying.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jerome,

I would argue that, if properly informed of the full extent of the leveraged invasiveness of tracking us, most folk, given the chance would vote it out of existence.

I don’t accept that offering “free services” and then asking you to “agree” to long complex legal text, constitutes consent as searching on the internet is almost as necessary today as water!

Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
You can request google, facebook or yahoo not to track you. This works in Europe, I don't know whether it works in the USA. Ironically, for the settings to be saved on google, you first need to register for a google account, so you give them more data to identify you and need to trust them.

You can also use software to block access to their servers. The most comprehensive solution is this one: https://pi-hole.net which runs on a small server (e.g. a raspberry pi) for all your home network. That also cuts you from their services, of course.

Even this last drastic measure will not be 100% efficient. If some of your friends use their services, their mail or their pictures can be used to infer quite a lot about your behaviour. For people at risk (e.g. public figures, activists not liked by the USA secret services, anyone susceptible to be the target of intelligence really), that is a problem. For the general public, less so.

The real acute problem, of course, is that the majority of internet use happens on phones today (and not on laptops computers) and about 2 billions people use android phones. Android phones are configured by default to report all what you do to google's servers (unless you have a Chinese model, which reports mainly to China). They listen to you (to recognise "OK, Google"), report your GPS position, upload your mail, contact lists, calendar entries, pictures and files to google's servers, use google's DNS which means every site you connect to is known to google. They have your phone number, credit card and if you use google pay they also have the list of your purchases. If one use a dating application (which I understand to be an almost requirement for people in their 20s...), they also have your romantic activities. Apps on Android use the firebase SDK which, by default report everything to google. They often use additional SDKs to report to additional servers, e.g. facebook.

We don't know yet the extent of the problem, because the technology to process that massive amount of data is still in its infancy. But the risks, even for the lambda citizen in a democratic country, are quite real. The most obvious risk, for example, is identity theft. If one knows so much about you, impersonating you online is comparatively trivial.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Thanks, Jerome!

Sometimes I admire your compact answers but her I applaud you generous effort in painting a rich, broad and frightening picture of the vacuuming up of our identities.

By now, they can, (likely as not), predict our behavior and response to their stimuli, far better than we can ourselves!

Terrifying but we seem to accept this as if nothing sinister has happened except we are all now chained to a massive Google slave galley, rowing in unison for their corporate growth!

Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
By now, they can, (likely as not), predict our behavior and response to their stimuli, far better than we can ourselves!

Not really. Humans still have free will.

The problem lies somewhere else. In privacy, as I already discussed and also in that big data is a numbers game. Google and Facebook cannot aim their systems to influence the behaviour of precisely your friend Bill or Jim, but they can influence enough Bills and Jims to get whomever they want elected as president of the USA. There is already a precedent.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
An upgrade to this thread, as I have used the same iPad during my recent travel to post images to this forum.

1: When posting images to this forum, the iPad now asks me if I want to reduce the size as it does for email (same sizes), but only when the selected picture is in an album (and not in photo stream or recent pictures).
2: There is a new application called "shortcuts" to write small programs. Writing a shortcut to resize pictures was easy (see below)
3: Now attached SD cards os USB readers/disks appear under the application called "files". It is still a bit kludgy, but makes transferring large files much easier.
4: The new version of the "photos" application gains new features, most notably perspective correction. It is automatic when you take the picture directly on the iPad, as the orientation of the camera is then known. It is somewhat automatic with other cameras.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
This is a screen capture of the shortcut. Please create an album called "resized" first and change according to taste...

2660
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jerome, this good to know. But explain the “attached SD card” how does that happen? Does your iPad nowchave a slot for sad card or you have a 3Rd part clever device for that?

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Apple has sold a SD card reader which attaches to the lightning port for years.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJYT2AM/A/lightning-to-sd-card-camera-reader

Note that there have been 2 versions of that device, supporting USB2 and then USB3 speed and looking alike but for an almost illegible reference number: https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/12/review-apple-usb-3-lightning-to-sd-card-camera-reader/
Thanks!

I had no idea! But the speed of 1GB per minute is slow when I consider 64 and 128GB cards!

Is this the best there is? Do all smart phones suffer the same?

I see a great advantage if one needs to send a few key chosen images!

Thanks!

...but it’s another sign of being old fashioned when I thought I was up to date.

Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
AFAIK, the iPhones only support USB-2 speeds. Probably the limitation is that USB-3 chipsets use more power. The iPads "pro" support USB-3. Transferring pictures from an SD card is still a somewhat frustrating experience, however: before photos are transferred, the iPad wants to display all pictures on the card for you to choose and that takes ages. If you keep the pictures after transfer, as I did, the same photos will be displayed each day.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Are the stored pictures just taking up space in the cloud or saved at full size on the iPad/iPhone?

The latter would be a problem for modern camera files!
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
Are the stored pictures just taking up space in the cloud or saved at full size on the iPad/iPhone?

The latter would be a problem for modern camera files!

Actually, the real problem is when pictures are saved in iCloud. Uploading them really takes time. Saving them on the iPad (providing you have the space of course) is much more convenient. Then, they can be transferred back to a computer, if needed.
 
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