Community

I receive a lot of "How do I.." mails and I get a lot of feature requests.

So I made a forum where you are all very very welcome to share your ideas and help each other out - and I'll of course keep an eye on it and participate when I can.

If you like the app, please consider supporting its development by rating it and/or posting a positive review in iTunes (you have to click "view in iTunes" to be able to do this)

Tweet to the world about it. If you add @AppStore to your tweet, perhaps I'll get a mention!

Thanks so much for your overwhelming interest and I hope the Snitch will help you get some extra cool pictures home!

Are locked collections encrypted?

No, the files within locked collections are not encrypted.

When you lock a collection, it is only being blocked from viewing by others than the Superuser inside the app. Think of it as a closed door that only you have the key for. What's inside is untouched.

When you back up your device, all the images are copied to your computer and unless you encrypt this backup, sneaky people with access to your computer would also have access to these files.

Do I need to be connected to a wireless network?

Yes. Your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and wireless transmitter both need to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network in order to talk to each other.

At the moment these devices don't not offer the ability to set up an ad-hoc connection - which would eliminate the need for any other hardware.

Hopefully Apple will add this feature at some point.

However: if you have a Canon transmitter, you may be in luck. Check out this post on the forum..

Setting up FTP access

When setting up a connection to an FTP server you need a username, a password, a port, and an IP address.

The first time you start ShutterSnitch you will be asked to set up your personal password.
The default username and the port ("snitch"/26000) can be changed at any time from the Settings app.
Whenever you create/enter a collection you will see, in the bottom right corner, what IP your device has been assigned.

Set up your wireless image transmitter using these values and you're done.

Read about Canon WFT-xx FTP access here.

Click here if you have an Eye-Fi card.

Transfer from an Eye-Fi card

The main file transfer method will always be FTP. But to make life easier for Eye-Fi users, I've added support for direct transfer from the card - instead of having the files hit the Eye-Fi web server first.

If you just bought your Eye-Fi card, you'll need to set it up first on your computer.

Armed with your Eye-Fi account, open ShutterSnitch and from the collection overview, tap the Options button in the top left corner. Pick "Setup Guide" and tap the type of Eye-Fi card you have.

For non-mobi cards, a log in window appears and once you log into your Eye-Fi account you'll be able to pick the card you want to receive files from.

You only need to run this guide once or when you want to change to another Eye-Fi card.

Now open or create a new collection, take a picture and it should arrive. It can take a little while for the card to discover ShutterSnitch the first time it sends an image, so please give it a little time. If nothing happens, try taking the Eye-Fi card out of the camera and putting it in again. That usually gets things going!

Note: make sure that Relayed Transfer is turned off (via the Eye-Fi Center) the first time the card should send to your device. Once it knows about the device, it should be OK to turn it back on.

"Online Sharing" uploads from Eye-Fi cards

Since Eye-Fi wants to send you the pictures through their own servers when using Online Sharing, there are a couple of bottle necks in there - so in this case, take the "Know the little secrets within seconds" with a grain of salt.

The Eye-Fi server has to have access to your FTP server from the Internet. To make this happen, follow these steps:

1. Set up your ShutterSnitch port to 26000 in the Settings app.
2. Make sure that your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch is assigned the same IP address every time it joins your wireless network. You set this up on your router - Google the name of your router and "address reservation" if you're in doubt.
3. Set up your router to forward any port 26000-26500 traffic to the IP that you just reserved.
4. Configure your Eye-Fi card to do "Online Sharing" with an FTP server. The URL will be ftp://<your IP or hostname on the Internet>:26000 using an unencrypted connection.

Read more on Eye-Fi FTP access here.

Why can't I connect on port xxxx?

On an iPad all ports below 1024 are blocked, so you won't be able to connect on those, sorry.

UPDATE: Looks like ports below 1024 are open on iOS 5.1!

The app crashes all the time!

As much as we'd like it, the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are not as capable as desktop computers yet. And when working with graphics, memory is king.

Take a 12 megapixel photo for example. When saved to disk as a JPEG it may be 2.5 megabytes, but when loading it into memory it will be: 12.000.000 pixels x 4 colors (red, green, blue, and transparent) = 48 MB.

A 21 megapixel photo takes up 84 megabytes.

An iOS device uses about 80-120 megabytes of memory for the system and the built-in apps

The iPad, the iPhone 3GS and new iPod touches are build with 256 megabytes of memory. The iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2. generation only have 128MB.

As you can see, that's not much available memory. ShutterSnitch does a lot of things to use as little memory as possible, but still - don't get surprised if the app is killed because you're juggling 21 megapixel photos..

The iPhone 4, 4S, and iPad 2 comes with 512 MB of memory. The 3rd gen. iPad and iPhone 5 has 1GB. That's more like it, when working with graphics of these sizes.

The solution for devices with very little memory: transfer smaller photos. It will speed up the transfer time, turn down processing time, and put a stop to crashes.

Unstable transfers using a WFT unit

If you're experiencing unstable transfers using a Canon WFT unit, make sure you have disabled Passive mode in your WFT settings.

This setting can be found under WFT settings -> Set up -> LAN settings -> FTP Server -> Passive mode

Online Manual

I try, I really do, to make all functions logical and intuitive ..but as features pile on, things get comprehensive. So I started an Online Manual with lots of screenshots and info.

Eye-Fi troubleshooting

Wireless is great! ..When things work.

If they don't - it can be a pain to figure out what exactly is wrong, because you can't see why nothing's happening.

The following guide will tell you just how the Eye-Fi transfers work, which will hopefully help you get to the root of the problem.

Click the Next and Previous links below to navigate through the guide.

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The very first step: Set up your card

First you need to make sure that the card won't be uploading the photos to the Eye-Fi server on the Internet. If it does this, it will never be sent to ShutterSnitch.

Insert your Eye-Fi card into your computer, open the Eye-Fi Center, and configure your card not to do any online sharing and not to relay photos.

Doublecheck that your card can join the same wireless network that your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch is on.

Save the settings, put your card back into your camera and close down your computer (You don't have to do this every time, but during troubleshooting it's just to make sure it doesn't interfere with our next step).

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Take over the receiver role

On your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch test, with Safari, that you're connected to the Internet.

Then open ShutterSnitch go to the collection overview and tap the "Options" button in the top left corner, pick "Setup Guide", and tap the type of Eye-Fi card you have.

For non-mobi cards, sign into your Eye-Fi account, turn on the buttons for the cards you want to receive from, and press "Done".

What this does, is it tells the Eye-Fi Internet server that your card should no longer send its photos to your computer, but to ShutterSnitch instead. The Eye-Fi server will also tell ShutterSnitch a secret that only it and the card will know. This way, your photos will only be received by trusted receivers.
Note: none of this information ever leaves your device. Privacy is important..

Now, enter or create a collection. This will start a listener that listens to any Eye-Fi cards asking to send a picture.

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Receiving files

Note that ShutterSnitch receives files. It does not pull them or ask for them. It can't. Here's how it works:

When you take a picture with your camera, the photo is saved to your Eye-Fi card and it goes to work. It connects to the Wifi network and checks for new files on the card. It keeps a log of which files have been transferred - if there are any new ones, it will start looking for receivers.

If none is found in the first try, and you haven't disabled relayed transfers - it'll upload the photo to the Eye-Fi server online and never try to push it anywhere else again. The Eye-Fi software on your computer will then download it. ShutterSnitch can't do this - that's why you have to turn relayed transfers off. Don't give the card a chance to let the photo slip past us.

The card will find ShutterSnitch and ask it if it knows "the password" (which it got when you ran the Setup Guide).

ShutterSnitch will reply "Here you go" and if the card is satisfied, it will start sending the file. Once it's done, ShutterSnitch will say "Thanks" - if it doesn't, the card will send again. If it does, the card will log the picture as having been sent and it will never send it anywhere again.

Note that if "Accept JPEGs only" is turned on in the ShutterSnitch settings, nothing will happen if your camera is set to just save RAW files!

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Troubleshooting

You now know how things work.

If none of this information has helped you find the reason for your problem, you can try getting the card log. Insert your card into your computer and get it through the Eye-Fi Helper menu.

If the log doesn't make any sense to you, head over to the Forums and ask for help with it.

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Forgotten Superuser password

If you don't remember what superuser password you entered the very first time you installed the app, you can reset it via the in-app Settings -> Advanced page -> Reset Superuser Password.

Can't import photos from the Photos app?

In order for ShutterSnitch to get the best representation of the images from your photo library, you'll have to enable access to the Location Services.

This is because your photos could contain your geo location.

So if you're getting a "Could not save the file" message when trying to import photos from the photo library, open the Settings app and make sure that ShutterSnitch is allowed acccess via the following 2 options in the Settings app:

Privacy -> Location Services -> ShutterSnitch

and

Privacy -> Photos -> ShutterSnitch

Don't worry: ShutterSnitch will never send or share your location with anyone. (Except if you chose to mail/share a photo that contains geo location)

General transmission issues.

Wireless is great - but hard to troubleshoot because things are "invisible".

If you're experiencing issues and would like to know a little more about what's going on behind the scenes, go into the ShutterSnitch settings, scroll all the way to the bottom, and turn on "Traffic Inspector".

Now, when you enter a collection, you'll see a window that logs whatever's going on.

If the log doesn't answer your question, feel free to copy it and paste it in a post on the forum, detailing your issue.