Literally the day after I got the iPhone 4S, I took a trip to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. Although the 4S has a great camera that’s always with you, it still has the rolling shutter and blah blah the photography blogs have it all by now. So I brought my “real” camera, which is a 1080p24 Sony Camcorder that takes 12MP stills. When I got home I put all the images in Aperture and synched the album back to my iPhone. And Here’s What I Got.

For some reason, and I’m not sure if Aperture, iTunes, or iOS did this, the dimensions of the pictures got halved, resulting in one quarter of the number of pixels.

Making sure it wasn’t some forgotten code in Auto Adjust halving sizes because of memory warnings I decided to check a picture straight from the camera roll. Yep, full 8MP. So what is going on here?

UPDATE

OK so I uploaded an image and saved it using Safari and…

It would appear it’s not iOS, so it’s either Aperture or iTunes, and either way that’s stupid, but at least I have my workaround.

On a side note, Auto Adjust had no trouble with those 12.3MP and it took the iPhone longer to write the data than to process it. When Auto Adjust came out with the iPhone 3G in mind, the thought of doing anything larger than the 1600×1200 photos the device could take was a frightening one. Images have to be decompressed into RGBA bitmaps with some more room for overhead so that 12.3MP picture is really 49,298,944 bytes of RAM. It’s one of those times you get pissed at Apple for not going up to 1024MB on the iPhone 4S (other things need that RAM too you know). Case and point: iPod Touch has 256MB, and crashed after processing and trying to save to the library. It was a nice hard crash too as it restarted all the background shit like FaceTime and Mail.