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| New Version 8! | Home | Email Support |
With Version 8.2, WidePhotoViewer is a paid app and all premium features are available. The in-app upgrade is no longer available, or needed.
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Here's a directory to the WidePhotoViewer help pages:
Main Help Page (this page; scroll down to see it) Using FTP With WidePhotoViewer Viewing Your SmugMug Photos with WidePhotoViewer Setting Up WidePhotoViewer for Print Ordering (Version 7.1) Importing WidePhotoViewer Selections into Lightroom and Photo Mechanic |
WidePhotoViewer is "wide" in two senses:
WidePhotoViewer Free can access only one of Flickr, Facebook, and SmugMug at a time; you have to logout of one before you can login to another. LifePics is always available; Dropbox and WPV Library are a premium features. The premium version (an in-app upgrade from the home-screen action menu) allows all three to be accessible at once.
Accessing your own photos and those of your contacts or friends is quick. You can add photographers and groups to the main QuickList to make accessing them quick, too, even if they're not contacts or you're not a member of the group.
There's a powerful Flickr explore menu for Interestingness, Recent from Everyone, Getty, Commons, and Galleries. And, you can search for photos and groups by tag.
Some other free features are:
Premium features (in-app upgrade):
("Set" here refers to a Flickr set, a Facebook album, a SmugMug gallery, or a Dropbox or FTP folder.)
For more info, go to the WidePhotoViewer web site.
| Logging in (or not) |
Without logging in to your Flickr account,
you can view the built-in panoramic samples or explore (see below).
When you do login,
you see:
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| Sets, Photos, Slideshows | When you tap on a set, you see its photos in the Grid View (see below). |
| Explore Flickr |
Tap Explore Flickr (in the QuickList section) to see
photos that are:
You can also search for photos or groups by tag. If you like a photo or group, you can save the photographer or group to the QuickList for easy access. |
| Download | Use the action menu in the Grid View to download a set for offline access. It's added to the QuickList. |
| Logging in | When you login to your Facebook account, you see photos in your albums, and also a list of your friends. Tapping a friend's name shows you his or her albums. |
| Albums, Photos, Slideshows | When you tap on an album, you see its photos in the Grid View (see below). |
| Missing Albums |
If you don't see your friend's albums,
it's probably because he or she has denied permission
for apps run by friends to see his or her photos.
Here's how your friend can fix this:
Here are step-by-step, illustrated instructions. |
| Download | Use the action menu in the Grid View to download an album for offline access. It's added to the QuickList. |
| Logging in | When you login to your SmugMug account, you see a list of your categories and sharegroups. Tapping on a category or sharegroup shows you a list of its galleries. |
| Galleries, Photos, Slideshows | When you tap on a gallery, you see its photos in the Grid View (see below). |
| Sharegroups | Tap on Your Sharegroups to see your Sharegroups; tapping on a Sharegroup shows you the galleries in that group. |
| Download | Use the action menu in the Grid View to download a gallery for offline access. It's added to the QuickList. |
More on viewing SmugMug photos with WidePhotoViewer is here.
To access any LifePics services, you have to first create an account if you don't have one, or login if you do. You can do both from within WidePhotoViewer by choosing LifePics signup/login from the Login menu on the home screen.
After logging in, you can upload to LifePics any photos that are resident on your device: Photos in the Photo Library, photos in the WidePhotoViewer Library (FTPed to WidePhotoViewer), or photos in your Dropbox. You can also upload any photos in saved albums on the QuickList.
More about using LifePics with WidePhotoViewer is here.
| Albums, Events, Faces | View your Photo Library, with full support for Grid View, Fullscreen View, and Slideshows. |
| Upload | Upload any photos to Flickr, Facebook, or SmugMug. Tap a button to mark all photos for uploading, or tap individual photos to mark them. |
| Arranging your Dropbox |
Create a folder named "WidePhotoViewer" directly under your Dropbox root,
and then folders under that,
in multiple levels if you like.
Folders that contain only JPEGs (no other folders) are shown as albums.
For example:
Don't forget to put what you want to appear in WPV under a folder named "WidePhotoViewer" (red arrow). If a folder contains both JPEGs and one or more other folders, those JPEGs are ignored. |
| Loggin In | Login to Dropbox from the WidePhotoViewer Login menu and you'll see your albums. They're automatically cached on your iPhone/iPod/iPad for offline viewing. |
| Offline Access | If you're offline or not logged into Dropbox, cached folders and photos are shown. |
| Synching | If you're online, synching is automatic when you tap on a Dropbox folder. You can also synch the whole Dropbox tree by choosing Full Dropbox Synch form the home-screen action menu. |
| Deleting Folders | You can delete a Dropbox folder by swiping right to expose the Delete button, or by tapping Edit on the home screen. This only deletes the copy cached within WidePhotoViewer; it doesn't affect the folder on Dropbox itself. |
The same rules for nesting folders with Dropbox apply to the WPV Library: You can nest to multiple levsls, but JPEGs appear only if they're in a folder that contains no other folders.
If you want an album description to appear in the Grid View, put your desired text in a file named "description.txt" in the folder containing the JPEGs.
You can delete a WPV Library (FTP) folder by swiping right to expose the Delete button, or by tapping Edit on the home screen.
WARNING: Version 8.0 has a bug that causes a crash when you delete a WPV Library folder. Instead, start the FTP server and delete with your FTP client running on your computer. This bug has been fixed in version 8.1, which is on its way to the App Store now.
| Stills and Movies | Press the home-page camera icon to start the camera. Shooting a still photo takes you to the Photo Library Camera Roll (in WidePhotoViewer) so you can upload to Flickr, Facebook, or SmugMug right away. Movies are stored in the Photo Library, but you have to use the Photos app to see them. |
The Grid View shows as many photos as will fit on the screen; you swipe down to see more. Images are fetched as needed, so you don't have to worry about paging or any limits.
| Photo Size |
You have a choice of three sizes:
to see the caption also (Flickr calls it the description).
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| Fullscreen view | Tap on a photo to view it in the Fullscreen View (see below). | ||||||
| Slideshow |
Tap on the slideshow button
to get a menu of slideshow intervals (1 sec. to 20 sec.);
choosing a time starts the show (see below for more on the Slideshow View)
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| Editing | If you've upgraded to WidePhotoViewer Premium, tap on the compose button to see each title (Flickr and SmugMug) and description (Flickr only) in an field that you can edit. Then tap on the Done button to send your changes to the web site (Flickr or SmugMug). Editing isn't possible for Facebook because of limitations of their service; you have to do that directly on the site. | ||||||
| Selections |
Tap and hold on a photo and a green star will appear indicating that it's selected.
From the selection menu (pointing finger icon) you can select all, none, or invert the selections.
Choose Save Selections to copy the selections to the
Documents folder on your device
(retrievable with iTunes or FTP) and
to your Dropbox/WidePhotoViewer folder,
and, optionally, email them.
More on selections is here.
You can go beyond selections to provide a screen for ordering prints or other products. See the section "Print Ordering" below. |
The Fullscreen View shows thumbnails (set, group, search results, etc.) and a single photo, optionally with its date, owner, caption, comments, and EXIF data. It operates identically for Flickr, Facebook, and SmugMug.
| Views |
Buttons choose one of three views:
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| Thumbnails |
A button turns thumbnails on or off:
As in the Grid View, photos are automatically fetched as you swipe to the next photo, so you don't have to worry about paging or limits. | ||||||
| Comments and EXIF | In the photo/caption view, use the action menu to see comments or EXIF data. | ||||||
| Panoramas | Photos at least twice as wide as they are high are shown as panoramas: You can scroll the photo from side-to-side. The sample set of four panoramas shows you what this is like. | ||||||
| Photo Size |
To optimize photos for WidePhotoViewer, size them to a height of 768 pixels (assuming an iPad in landscape orientation) before you upload them to your account, and let the width be what it will.
Use a JPEG quality of no more than about 70% of its range.
For panoramas wider than 1024 pixels,
WidePhotoViewer will attempt to access the original-size photo,
which Flickr allows only for Pro accounts.
WidePhotoViewer won't use the original if its height is greater than 1200 pixels, because then it would be too big to download into your mobile device. In that case a size closer to 1024x768 size is used instead. | ||||||
| Downloading Time | Because photos that WidePhotoViewer is intended to show are often large, it takes several seconds to download each photo, especially very wide panoramas. For example, one of the sample photos is 5046x768, greater than 6:1 (1.4MB JPEG; 11MB expanded). | ||||||
| Slideshow |
Tap on the slideshow button
to get a menu of slideshow intervals (1 sec. to 20 sec.);
choosing a time starts the show (see below for more on the Slideshow View)
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| Stopping and Starting | Tapping on a photo stops the show; tapping on the play button restarts it from where it left off. Or, you can start it from the beginning by tapping the rewind button. When it's stopped, you can change the interval. |
| Titles |
Tap the caption button
to see titles during the slideshow.
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| Adding Directly | To add to the main-screen QuickList directly, tap the add button to go to the add screen. Enter the username or email of a Flickr user, or the nickname of a SmugMug site, and tap Search Flickr or Search SmugMug buttons. Or, tap the Surprise button to get a random Flickr user who has a photo on Flickr's list of interestingness. |
| People and Groups | When you're viewing a photo from Flickr, you can choose Add Owner from the action menu to add to the QuickList. When you're viewing a Flickr group, you can also choose Add Group. You can add a Facebook friend to the QuickList when you're viewing that friend's album list. |
| Sets | When you're viewing a Flickr set, Facebook album, SmugMug gallery, or LifePics album, you can add it to the QuickList from the Grid View action menu. |
| Deleting | You can delete from the QuickList by swiping the item or tapping the minus icon you see in Edit mode. |
By adding special coding to the description of an album, you can enable a screen that allows a user to order products that you specify. The order is then emailed to you. Details of how to set this up are here.
Selections you save (see Grid View, above) can be automatically imported into Lightroom and Photo Mechanic. More information is here.
