Tag Archive for: itunes

I love iPhone because it just does what you need. But i really hate the content management that Apple endorses with ITunes. I really hear every cell in my body shouting : “Get it out of here!”

The problem:

  • Photo and video management
  • Music management
  • Contact management

The tools (for all of you who are in a hurry to see the points):

I keep iTunes only for creating the backup of my phone and lazy rearrange of apps and folders 🙂

Lets get started…

I will start with the easy part, contacts

Managing contacts outside iTunes and outlook – Gmail bound

Well, i also hate outlook for contact management…it feels too “fat” 🙂

The only downside of this approach is that it uses gmail contacts.

What if you don’t use gmail? Well, then just create a gmail account only for this!

I have tried a lot of applications regarding this and i have found that Contacts Sync For Google Gmail By Playa Apps is the best. Support is great and it just delivers what you need. Perfect sync between Gmail contacts and iPhone. It preserves groups it transfers images and a lot more. Everything that you need.

That’s it!

Bringing Magic to your iPhone

Facts:

  • iPhone lets you only manage (copy/delete) the media you have in Camera Roll. Every thing else is only manageable from iTunes
  • The photos in the library can live in many albums. This means that you can have one photo and make it belong to more than one album.Its logic resembles flivkr a little bit.
  • The music and video files can only be managed fro the tedious iTunes
  • Ringtones are also problematic. You need to follow a somewhat complex procedure inside iTunes to make your own ringtone from a file (e.g MP3).

What worked for me:

Do yourself a favor and buy Xilisoft iPhone Magic. It will make everything that i mention above a game. I am searching for a long time in google for “itunes replacement” and i wonder why this hasn’t shown up as the first entry.

My Workflow:

1. Prepare my content

Personally i am using ACDSEE for some years now in order to manage my photos. I have applied keywords to all of my photos and i am able to find whatever i want.

Among all photo categories i have these two: Showcase and Moments. In showcase i assign photos that are something like the best photos that i have taken. In Moments i tend to put pics that i like and mostly are of various qualities.

I have decided that i want to have these 2 categories only in my Photo Libraries in iPhone. You can do whatever you want with your categories of course.

So i just bring up the photos i want and i make a batch export to a temporary directory.

TIP: ALWAYS is good to “enforce” the photo sorting in iphone. You can do this by renaming the photos during export and have in the beginning a sequence field (ACDSEE can do that). with this way you ensure that iPhone will have the photos in the sort order you want.

2. Fire up iPhone Magic

I connect my phone to the usb cable, and start the application. Although this application does a lot more i am using it for:

  1. Photo management: You can manage albums and upload photos in them by a simple right click. Personally in order to be sure i delete the 2 libraries and re upload them with the new photos in them.
  2. Music. Just right click and upload the mp3 you want in the music library of iPhone
  3. Videos. Right click -> add files and the application converts (if needed) the videos to the proper format and uploads them to the Video Library
  4. Ringtones: Add files , crop them and just saves them to your ringtones.

And that’s about what i do….

So what i really do is that every now and then i clear my camera roll by taking the media to my ACDSEE repository. I then assign them categories and if i put something in the categories i need for my phone i just do the above procedure. It seems complicated but you can make it simpler by just uploading whatever you want in your libraries with the application.

I hope you find it useful as much as i did!

Drop a comment if you have a question.