Documentation - Image Display

Pocket Album contains some advanced methods of rotating and scaling images, allowing for full customization of how pictures are displayed.

The different choices for rotation are:

Always rotate: this will always take the source image and rotate it 90° counter-clockwise.
Never rotate: this will never rotate the source image.
Smart rotate: this will selectively rotate the source image based on its dimensions. For a Pocket PC running in portrait mode, this means that portrait-oriented images would not be rotated, but landscape-oriented images would be rotated to fit the screen.


Pocket Album automatically scales images down to the device dimensions as it loads them. This behavior can be fine tuned by adjusting the settings on the Scaling tab named 'Scale up and crop'. Normally, Pocket Album will shrink an image down to the device screen, adding in the "black bars" so it can fit the whole image on the device screen.



When the image is rotated, the black bars come into effect, although the size of the image takes up on-screen is much larger. With "scale up and crop" turned on, Pocket Album won't shrink the image "as much," which will eliminate the black bar problem, and the image will fill the whole display. At the same time, however, this also means that the sides of the image have been cropped off in order to fill the display:



Normally, this cropping is not so much an issue, and the tradeoff with getting a nice full-size display of the image is worth the cropping.

The rotation and scaling settings are granular - different settings are applied under different circumstances. The following table oversees the paradigm of the default settings for rotation and settings:

	Pocket Album is in windowed mode	Pocket Album is in fullscreen mode
Device is connected to the desktop	Quadrant I Device is in the cradle, running Pocket Album. Desired usage: picture frame mode or image browsing mode. Device cannot easily be rotated by hand. Default Setting: Scale, never rotate.	Quadrant II Device is in the cradle, running Pocket Album in fullscreen mode. Desired usage: "picture frame mode". Pocket Album assumes that interaction with the device should be kept to a minimum. Default Setting: Scale, never rotate.
Device is disconnected to the desktop	Quadrant III Device is in-hand with Pocket Album running. Rotation of the device is "easy": just turn the device in-hand. Default Setting: Scale, never rotate.	Quadrant IV Device is in-hand. Desired usage: showing pictures with the best display available. Default Setting: Scale, smart rotate.

Quadrant I, III Image	Quadrant II Image	Quadrant IV Image

The settings under Tools->Options serve as the defaults for specific albums in Album mode. For example, for a normal photo album, the default settings will most likely be appropriate. For an album which represents a set of presentation slides, the "scale up and crop" settings will not be appropriate. Disable it under Album->Properties.

>> SmartAlbum Mode