I managed to fill up the multimedia card on the N70 — the only thing that’s surprising about that event is the length of time it took me to do it. 🙂 So I went looking for ways to get photos out of the phone into iPhoto. I can’t believe it took until the third page of Google’s responses to come up with this little treasure: Nokia Multimedia Transfer.
It would seem that the good folks at Nokia have finally discovered Mac. Nokia Multimedia Transfer allows you to browse your phone’s contents in a Finder-like window (similar to how the Nokia Phone Browser on Windows is Explorer-like) with full drag-and-drop support, sync music from iTunes to the phone, and have iPhoto treat the phone as a camera.
I installed the software (which is still labelled as a beta) and started it up… and straight away iPhoto lit up and told me that photos were ready to import. I had already set up Bluetooth connectivity to the phone for iSync, and the Nokia utility just used it. From this aspect alone, the integration of this software with the OS beats the Windows experience hands-down[1].
It’s not perfect, mind… It took a looong time for the iPhoto import to prepare (although it was looking through about 160 items, over Bluetooth 1). It finds all the supplied stock media as well, and wants to sync that (again, not really the tool’s fault, I probably should clean all that rubbish out some time or other so that it doesn’t show up in the phone’s Gallery either). And I still had to go through each photo to make sure the timestamp was correct and fix it if it wasn’t (there seems to be no pattern to this problem, a group of photos taken all at the same time had some with correct timestamps and others that were wrong).
Despite the problems though, it still beats sending photos via Bluetooth file transfer and manually importing them to iPhoto! Good stuff, Nokia.
[1] Okay, so Nokia doesn’t really get the bouquet all to themselves for that… the brickbat has to go to Windows’ stupid arrangement with third-party Bluetooth stacks and how hard that makes it for Nokia et-al to write their software.
Crossed Wires 