Monday, February 11, 2008

Storing Digital Photos on Your PSP

Using your PSP as a portable photo album is easy if you know how to fill the Memory Stick Duo card with images. If you know the different viewing options and controls on your PSP, you'll be showing off your photos in no time.

One of the PSP's most useful functions is also one of its most simple: the ability to display digital images. The majority of the tips covered in this chapter, and a few from other chapters, hinge on this simple ability. This tips walks you through the basics of managing digital images on your Sony PSP, different ways of getting the images onto the PSP, and navigating the images once they are on your PSP, and points you to some of the more useful ways digital images can be used to add functionality to your PSP.

Put Images in Your PSP
To place images in your PSP, you need to either mount your Memory Stick on your computer using a card reader, or connect your PSP to your computer using a USB mini to USB cable, select Settings >USB Connection from the PSP's Home menu, and hit the X button.

Once the Memory Stick shows up on your computer, you will find a folder called PSP in the card's root directory. Within the PSP folder are four other folders: GAMES, MUSIC, SAVEDATA, and PHOTO. You can simply copy any images that you want to carry around with you on your PSP into the PHOTO directory on the card.

You can also organize the photos on your PSP by grouping them in folders within the PHOTO folder.

Currently, none of the images on my PSP are larger than 250 KB in size, with the majority of the images falling in the 3264 KB range. You can view larger images on the PSP, but the larger the file size, the longer it will take the files to load, and you won't really see much improvement in image quality after a certain point because of the PSP's screen resolution.

PSP is only capable of reading one level deep into the PHOTO folder, so if you have another folder nested inside a folder inside your PHOTO folder, the PSP will either not see it, or it will show it as being corrupt data.

There are also a variety of programs available that automate organizing your pictures and moving them to your PSP. Two of them are iPSP (http://www.kaisakura.com/ipsp.php; $19.99 USD for both OS X and Windows) and PSPWare (http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/pspware; $15 USD for OS X and Windows). Both of these feature abilities beyond simply managing your pictures, and both programs have demo versions, so try before you buy. For example, after clicking on the Photos section of iPSP and choosing a photo album from iPhoto in OS X, iPSP begins automatically converting the images within the album into properly sized JPEGs and importing the images into their own directory within the PHOTO folder on the Memory Stick.

If you own a digital camera that works with a Memory Stick Duo card, then you can simply remove the card from your camera and put it in the PSP to view photos. When you choose Photo Memory Stick and hit the X button on your PSP, these images will appear in a directory called Digital Camera Images.

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