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Tuesday 16 June 2009

New Nokia Photo Browser is faster, SilentPhoto may silence your camera, cam idle activity patch extends camera timeout to 10 minutes

Nokia Photo Browser, SilentPhoto, camera
Nokia Photo Browser

Symbian's built-in photo viewer is not a good picture browser, especially if you have a Nokia with the horrible "carousel" photo viewer. But Resco Photo Viewer is expensive and free alternatives Panda Image Browser and To The Point lack many features.

Nokia Photo Browser from Nokia Beta Labs is better than Symbian's built-in photo viewer, but the picture viewer from Resco is much better.

Nokia Photo Browser displays your pictures in a grid through which you can scroll with all sorts of 3D effects and other eye candy. It does face recognition too, but only on high contrast frontal shots, not on photos en profil.

The main flaw of Nokia Photo Browser was the long time it needed to generate thumbnail preview images: upon first launch the program needed ages to make thumbnail pictures. Thumbnail preview generation in the new version of Nokia Photo Browser is much, much, much faster than in the previous edition.

Other flaws of Nokia Photo Browser remain unrepaired. When you've scrolled to the last image of your collection, scrolling further will not take you back to the first picture. And "Image Info" still doesn't display Exif data, but only the file name and the date the picture was shot. The user interface is in landscape mode, without an option to turn it into portrait view.

For every picture on your phone Nokia Photo Browser generates three preview images which together take 50 kb or even more. If you have many pictures on your built-in phone memory or memory card, the previews can make you run out of storage space. When you uninstall Nokia Photo Browser it leaves the preview images behind in a jungle of hidden folders. To reclaim your storage space you need to launch a file manager like Y-Browser, X-plore, or Active File and delete all folders called _PAlbTN. Nokia's built-in file manager will tell you that those folders are empty, but they're not.

Nokia Photo Browser


SilentPhoto

SilentPhoto runs in the background and automatically puts your phone in "silent mode" when you launch the camera. When you switch the camera off, your phone goes back to the previous (non-silent) mode.

Silent mode often suppresses the annoying shutter sound of your phone camera. But beware: with some Nokia product codes (a sort of region codes) your camera makes noise even if your phone is in silent mode. Fortunately there are many other ways to make your camera quiet, so if SilentPhoto doesn't work on your phone you can silence your camera anyway.

SilentPhoto on Symbian Freak (links to file farm ziddu)
SilentPhoto on Mobile Castle (with direct download link)
• the camera sound label with many methods to mke your camera silent


cam idle activity patch

Switch on your phone camera, wait for the opportunity to shoot that perfect shot...

...and miss it because your phone camera has gone into standby mode!

The camera of your Nokia will go to standby mode if it's not used for one minute. In standby mode pushing the camera button will not shoot apicture, but only gets your camera out of standby, and then you have to push the button again to make a picture. By then you may have lost the chance to make that once-in-a-lifetime picture.

But if you have hacked your phone and installed ROMPatcher, you can run a ROMPatcher patch that keeps your phone camera active for 10 minutes instead of one.

This patch only works on phones that use the camera application CamMojave.exe, like the Nokia N78, N82, N95, N96, 6220 Classic. It does NOT work on phones with z:\sys\bin\camcorder.exe, like the Nokia 6120 Classic, 6110 Navigator, N73, N95, E51, E66, E71.

cam idle activity patch on Symbian Freak (for members only)
cam idle activity patch (for everybody)


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