Am I doing something wrong?

[dreamshark]

Is the built-in Photo app on the iPhone/iPad/iTouch as stupid as it seems, or am I doing something wrong?

All I'm trying to do is manage the photos on my device in the most primitive way. I'm not trying to retouch them, share them, or photoshop them. All I want to do is manage albums or folders, including photos taken with the iPhone and photos downloaded from my computer. Here's all I'm trying to do:

1) Rotate pictures that were taken with a camera held in a sideways position (pictures downloaded from my computer, not taken on the iPhone).
2) Reorder the pictures in an "album"
3) Delete pictures (other than the ones I took with the iPhone).
4) Create new folders or albums and move or copy pictures from one to another.


All the pictures I take with the iPhone camera go into a default album called Camera Roll. I can delete these, but cannot reorder them or move them into a different album.
Pictures downloaded from my computer are totally unmanageable. They cannot be deleted, moved, reordered or even rotated!

Am I missing something here? My last two phones, which weren't even considered smart phones, offered the ability to do all of the things I listed above.

If this is really all there is in the iPhone Photo app - is there an app that I can download that will let me do these things?

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Macworld's iPhone photography update and iPhoneography and 10 Must have apps for iPhone. I'm pretty sure you can do a bunch of stuff on the phone itself.

Please keep in mind that iPhoto (for my Mac) is a program I loathe. It may be better in it's most recent incarnation, but still, it's one of the few Mac products that just doesn't work for me.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"I'm pretty sure you can do a bunch of stuff on the phone itself."

Yeah, right. Not. After a bunch of googling that mostly turned up other baffled iPhone users asking the same questions, I learned that no, you can't do much of anything with the photos on the iPhone. You can't rename them, reorder them, rotate them or even sort them into albums. The only ones you can delete are the ones you took yourself with the iPhone camera. Booooo. The "albums" created by the iPhone are like blocks of stone, can't even be manipulated by 3rd-party apps.

However, fortunately, it is possible for 3rd-party apps to copy photos from these albums and do things with them. I found the two apps I was looking for. PhotoSort ($1.99)lets you create new albums, arrange them in hierarchical folders, and populate them with pictures copied from the default Apple albums. Then you can sort and rename them.

Rotate&Crop (free!) does just what it says. It then saves the picture into the "Camera Roll," from whence it can be imported into the custom album you just created with PhotoSort. I think that with these two apps the iPhone becomes a useful enough camera that I may leave my Canon at home on my upcoming trip. First I'll have to deal with the limited battery life, though.

ETA: Thanks for the links, btw. I'm tempted by the ProCamera program on the "10 Must Have" page.