My Gigabeat: My S30 Review: Photo Management

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

My S30 Review: Photo Management

I was going to post about video before photos, but I needed to "backup" a DVD to DivX and signup for Vongo...

As you can tell from this picture I use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11), so keep that in mind if you are planning to use Windows Media Player 10.

WMP 11 does a real good job of indexing all my photos. You can view them by: Recently Added, All Pictures, Keywords, Date Taken, Rating, and Folder.

It is very easy to sync some photos to your Gigabeat. All you have to do is to drag and drop the photos in to the "drop zone" to the right. Once you are done you click on Start Sync. It took maybe 20 seconds to add 30 photos.

On your Gigabeat you can view your photos through two menu options: Date and Folder. Date is the date of when your photo was taken. Folder is the name of the folder where you keep the photos on your computer. It is wise, if you haven't already, to order your photos in descriptive folders before you sync them to your Gigabeat. There is no way to create and edit folders on your Gigabeat.

Besides just browsing the pictures on your Gigabeat you can also view them in a slide show. You can view all photos, photos in a folder, or photos on a certain date in a slide show. The photos fades out and in between transitions. The transition can be set from 3 seconds to 30 seconds interval. If you want to see more detail on a photo you can use the 2x zoom. The quality of the photo is high enough that even with the zoom it looks sharp.

There is very little banding in the photos. The colors are very vibrant and looks just like the originals on my PC.

To change from the default landscape mode you go to Settings -> Pictures -> Display.

If you want to use Explorer to drag and drop your photos onto the Gigabeat you can. But when I tried it did give me a warning the files are not in the right format to be viewed on the Gigabeat. Once the photos where on the Gigabeat I check if I could view them and I couldn't. The photos are on the Gigabeat, and works fine as storage. Just don't expect to view them on the Gigabeat.

I really don't know why you would use Explorer, since it is much easier to browse your pictures on WMP11. The benefit with WMP 11 is also that you don't have to drag a complete folder to the Gigabeat to maintain the folder on the player. As long as the photo is in a folder in the root of your main photos location it will be available on the Gigabeat.

If you have a camera that supports USB Mass Storage devices or PTP Toshiba says that you should be able to transfer photos to your Gigabeat on the go. The player comes with a USB converter that will allow you to connect your standard USB cable from your camera. My Nikon Coolpix S2 worked great. I transferred 10 pictures in less than a minute. The real good thing was that I was able to view the photos on my Gigabeat. I'm not so sure that will work with all cameras. There is a disclaimer alert after your photos are transferred that they might not be visible on the Gigabeat. I don't have a camera with RAW format. Hopefully someone else can test that and report back.

I think I covered all the bases on the photo management. If you have any questions post a comment or use the forum topic for my review.

My goal is to post on video tomorrow night.

posted by Tomas @ 3:11 AM

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9 Comments:

DC said...: Tomas,

The maximum amount of space you can reserve on the Toshiba s30 is 2gb, does that mean that you can only transfer 2gb of pictures/videos directly from a digital camera to the S30?; Wed Jun 07, 05:29:00 AM 2006
Anonymous said...: anyway you could post a picture on the gigabeat, just to see what it looks like?; Wed Jun 07, 04:18:00 PM 2006
Lance said...: It appears that that folders can be created. My pictures are sorted on my S30 by there folder location. For example pictures that were in c:\vacation are in "vacation" on my s30 and pictures that were in c:\documents and settings\myprofile\my pictures are in a mypticutes folder on my s30. I had to add the folders to my libary in wmp11 .; Wed Jun 07, 09:38:00 PM 2006
Tomas said...: Yeah I was trying to say that, but I probably weren't that clear. Finished this one late last night.

"The benefit with WMP 11 is also that you don't have to drag a complete folder to the Gigabeat to maintain the folder on the player. As long as the photo is in a folder in the root of your main photos location it will be available on the Gigabeat."

:); Wed Jun 07, 10:48:00 PM 2006
Anonymous said...: So Tomas, what about the audio review? Saving the best till last? :p

Appreciate all the effort you're going to though. Being in Australia, it's annoying to see everyone else getting to play with one, and knowing I'll have to wait indefinitely :D; Thu Jun 08, 05:07:00 AM 2006
Joshua said...: A really nice video of the Gigabeat S30 is available at Akihabaranews.com:

A quick look at the GigaBeat S30!; Fri Jun 09, 03:37:00 AM 2006
Anonymous said...: Have some questions.
How large was the pictures you transfered from your camera and do you have a card reader with usb2.0.
If you do could you connect it instead of the camera and try to transfer photos from the memory card and see how long a full 1GB card will take, or a 512Mb card.
I´m interested in if the device realy have usb2.0 on the host-function since it should be much faster with a compatible cardreader then most cameras that only have usb1.0.
Is it possible to change the setting of only 2GB of storage for photos transfered directly from a camera?

Thank you for an otherwise splendid job!; Sun Jun 18, 08:26:00 AM 2006
Anonymous said...: Have you tried to load more than 2GB of pictures to the player directly from the digital camera. When I read the online manual I conclude that you can exclusively reserve 2GB for just photos meaning you cant put anything elese there. That doesn´t mean you can´t load more than 2GB of pictures to the player so could you please try?; Sun Jun 18, 12:46:00 PM 2006
superkev said...: I'm trying to figure out if the Gigabeat can be used to store files other than music and video and JPG... for instance, RAW files from a camera. Is it possible to drag and drop them to and from the Gigabeat in WMP?; Mon Jun 19, 09:32:00 AM 2006