This is going to be a pretty short entry to the series.  Every one of these players is able to store and display photos.  But let’s be honest, that is really not the main draw of any of them.  No one buys an iPod or a Zune or any of the others for photos.  You can get a cheap $10 digital picture frame to carry on your keychain if that is all you want.  Still, the fact that these do display your photos is a nice added benefit.  So, let’s see how they do.

Getting your photos onto the players was really about the same process as video.  The iPod and Zune used the iTunes and Zune desktop software respectively.  This made it pretty easy to get photos onto the devices.  The Sandisk Sansa View and Sony Walkman Video both allowed you to drag and drop photos onto your device.  A little tricky navigations, but still no problem.

As with video, however, the Creative Zen X-fi and Samsung YP-P2 gave me trouble.  With the Samsung, I was able to use the downloaded conversion tool to transfer photos to the device.  This program, however, is extremely unstable, and crashed repeatedly.  When it worked, it worked well.  But I was only able to successfully convert a few photos before it crashed.  The Creative Zen was another story altogether.  I never found a way to get my photos onto this device.  Once again, I was horribly disappointed by this one.

Before we get started, here is something pretty cool that the iPod can do.  When you highlight (but do not click) the pictures menu item, the ribbon on the bottom of the screen streams your photos.  What a great touch that was.

There is not a lot of difference between the different players.  They all call up a photo wall of thumbnails (except the Sansa which used a relatively convenient text menu), which you can use to scroll through the photos to select the one you want. 

Select the photo to begin viewing.  All of the players allow you to view an individual photo or view an entire slideshow.

One thing I liked about the iPod was that it used the motion sensor to sense the orientation of your device.  The photo on the screen rotated automatically when you switched between portrait and landscape mode.

I thought the Zune gave you the best access, allowing you to sort by date or folder.  Or just select play slideshow right from the start.  Additionally, it gives you thumbnails for each folder, as well as each picture.

The others all allow you to view individual photos or sort by folder.  Really, nothing much stood out here.  Like I said, you are not buying these players for viewing photos, and all of them were more than adequate.

One thing I will say which was not a factor was the size of the screen.  These small screens are far better for photos than they were for video.  Viewing a still picture, instead of trying to watch complex actions in a movie like Iron Man or Transformers worked just fine on all of these players.

So, which one was the best?  While all of these were adequate, I gave the edge to the iPhone and Zune.  and a huge fail for the Creative Zen X-fi, which I was completely unable to load.  Not that the Samsung fared much better, with the conversion software crashing several times before successfully loading only about a dozen pictures.

There, see…I told you this one would be pretty short.  Stay tuned as we will continue our search for the perfect media player by looking a little closer at some of the specs, such as. battery, memory, and wireless connectivity.  If you missed any part of this series, don’t forget to check out the archives, where you can read every installment.

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