Image Size Best Practices for Mobile Application

Question

I am building a mobile application that will target iPhone/iPad and Android phones. The application will involve users taking photos and uploading to my server and later on

Answer 1

I don't have a full answer for you, but I do have some thoughts...

1) I'd suggest reducing the image sizes before uploading. If I were using your application and I had to upload a 4 meg photo, everytime I wanted to use your application, I'd probably pass. And as we venture forward, we're hitting much better technology in terms of camera phones; Nokia has released a 41 megapixel camera, which I'm guessing will create rather large images. Users having to download a 4-6 MB image is also not a great idea. Just some thoughts from a user point of view.

2) I wouldn't cut the images. You don't necessarily know what parts of the image aren't important, so how would you know where to crop it? Let the phone size the pictures accordingly and rely on the ability to zoom into pictures to see things at a larger size.

3) You could try to make a UI that hides buttons. If you have something really simple (like just going forward or backwards) you could rely on gesture controls (swiping) to move around your application. You can implement sliding drawers and menus that take up space temporarily, when in use, but give you the space back when you want to look at the main content (pictures, in your case). I've typically found that hiding buttons doesn't work well and people seem to want/search for buttons that let them navigate, but the Android gallery works just fine with menu + swiping only, so who really knows.