May 6, 2022

Pixel 6 camera - downloading photos

First, a quick rant. I hear a lot about lenses and sensors and such. What I want is a phone/camera that makes it simple and easy to transfer my photos to my computer. Ideally I would like to grab my phone, and a USB cable, and import photos straight into Lightroom. Up to now this has always been a world of hell and frustration with every phone I have laid hands on. If the phone makers want us to view the phone camera as more than a toy to dork around with on social media they need to address this issue. Bouncing photos through some cloud service is simply unacceptable.

Hook or crook

After spending several hours with a USB cable and both a Linux machine and a Windows 10 machine, I have given up on that route. Perhaps it can be done, but it is neither obvious nor easy.

Now I am ready to use pretty much any method. I took some photos yesterday that I would like to put up on a big screen and that I would like to get into Adobe Lightroom to edit for a website.

Airdroid app

I install this. I launch the app and create an account. It aks for the option to always run in the background. I say no. I give it permission to manage all files.

Now it tells me to go to www.airdroid.com and download a client for my computer. They have clients for windows, Mac, or "web", so I choose web. I log into the web site. And there are my photos under "Photos". I click on "select all" and "download" and I see that there are 345 photos in Camera. They are all going to Camera.zip via the browser. It may be slow. It may be ridiculous sending all this data via Wifi to some server and then back again to my machine here. But it works, or at least it seems to.

After almost 2 hours it is done. I have Camera.zip on my linux machine, 1.4 G in size. I unzip it, and everything looks right. So I delete ALL the photos off of my phone. I have no intention of archiving photos on my phone. That is what I have lightroom for.

Another way is to connect to 192.168.0.126:8888. This in fact works fine. The phone makes a sound and presents a dialog asking if you want to accept a connection. Once you connect, there you are with the same web interface as visiting their website, but presumably with traffic staying on your own network. Using this interface, it is possible to download individual photos (and perhaps I could have done the big zip file much more efficiently?

Raw capture

This is not on by default, but it easy enough to turn on. Fire up the camera app (the easy way is to double click the power button, which is a handy shortcut that I very much like). There is a gear icon for camera settings at the upper left, click this. Go to "more settings", then "Advanced", then touch on "Raw + JPEG" control. And there you are.

What I see using Airdroid is a "Raw" folder alongside of a "Camera" folder. 

-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom  6960797 May  6 16:51  PXL_20220506_234508555.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 12105766 May  6 16:54  PXL_20220506_234508555.dng
I do like that Google chose to use the Adobe DNG format.

Where did my 50 megapixels go? They lied to me!

The above is what I see for an identical image in jpg and dng formats. They both identify as 4080 by 3072 pixel images. These are 12 megapixel images, so you may be asking what ever happened to the 50 megapixel camera resolution we heard so much about? The ultrawide sensor is 12 megapixels, so perhaps this was shot using it? The camera selection was 1.0 One article says:
Despite the main wide lens having a 50-megapixel image sensor, the Pixel 6s can only spit out 12-megapixel photos; there's no way to shoot full-resolution pics like on other Android phones with high-resolution sensors.
So, what does this mean? Is the 50 megapixel sensor specification sneaky doubletalk? More or less it is, if we can never get our hands on all those pixels. The phone may hoard them internally and do some kind of averaging, but at that point it is all pretty moot to me.

On the other hand, I am sort of happy not to be storing a bunch of 50 megapixel raw files. And are they even raw files, or what does a "raw file" mean in the context of a Pixel 6? All this seems a little shady in the absence of clear explanations. And maybe they are out there. Stay tuned.

One saying that I find to be true almost every day is "we are surrounded by lies". As I read about this, it is funny to find lots of people saying, "you don't really want 50 megapixels, you aren't shooting for billboards, etc. etc." Yes, that may be, but don't lie to me. I actually could make good use of 50 megapixels despite what all these morons say. It is called cropping. The Sony Alpha 7R II has 42 megapixels and people (including a friend of mine) make good use of them.

But at the end of the day, I am fine with the 12 megapixel images from the Pixel 6.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Cell Phones / tom@mmto.org