Andy’s iPhone Blog

I was in a rush to get ready for my business trip to Washington, DC. I was trying to save a few pennies as I was traveling on a Sunday and had time to take mass transportation to my hotel in Arlington, VA. I fired up Google on my Mac, looking for transportation from Dulles airport (IAD) to the hotel. Checked out the hotel web site and determined I could take the Metrorail. I identified the bus that takes you to Metro station. Looked at the Metro map online at www.wmata.com and was ready to go.

My next step was to obtain a Metro map that I could load onto my iPhone. I wanted to visit some DC monuments and sites while in town. Should be easy, I thought. Turns out this was not the case.

My first attempt was to grab a PDF of a the Metro map. I tried to import it into iPhoto to sync with the iPhone. IPhoto will not import PDFs. Bummer! I opened the PDF in the Mac Preview app and saved as a JPG. Then I imported it into iPhoto and sync’d with my iPhone. Thought I was good-to-go but when I viewed the photo on the iPhone, it was scaled way to small. I could not read it or enlarge it sufficiently to read it. Argh!

OK, I had read about sending PDFs as email attachments. You can view these attachments on the iPhone. I sent myself an email but had the same issue of not being able to enlarge the (PDF) image to the point I could read it. Not good.

Back to iPhoto. I took the JPG image I had imported into iPhoto and duplicated it 3 times. Cropped the images into quarters (1/4 X 4 of the original image) and sync’d the images with the iPhone. I now had 4 photos on the iPhone that could be zoomed (via the pinch, two-finger gesture) and read. I was good to go for my trip.

There must be a better, easier way but I haven’t figured it out. I know I could just view the the website I downloaded the images from, but try that while riding an underground train with intermittent EDGE connection. Let me know if you have a better way to get large images into the iPhone that are zoom-able and read-able.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under iPhone ramblings, Hints and tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.