Sync iPhone photos wirelessly with Cinq
is an interesting and necessary free app for the iPhone. It wirelessly transfers your pictures from your iOS device to your home Mac or PC, either over 3G or Wi-Fi. There are three versions of the app: a paid version for the iPhone, a free (ad-supported) version and a paid version for the iPad. I tried the free version.
Here's how it works. After going to the Cinq website and signing up for a free account, you download a little server app that runs on your home computer. On the Mac, you access it from the menu bar. Take a picture on your iPhone, or select an image from your picture roll, and it uploads in full resolution to your home computer. No cables, no iTunes or iPhoto sync needed.
The photos you send to your Mac go in a folder accessed from the Cinq app. When everything is set up there is a further bonus: you can see all your iPhoto libraries from your iOS device. You can save them from your phone, email them to others or send them to TwitPic or Facebook. That's come in handy more than a few times. Cinq has features that should have been built into iOS, or at least been a MobileMe feature. You can send your photos to MobileMe, but they aren't on your home computer, just in the cloud.
Unfortunately, uploads of pictures are pretty slow; over 3G, they generally took more than a minute. You also can't send photos in the background without the app being onscreen, which iOS 4 should be capable of doing. The developers say faster uploads and background uploads are forthcoming.
Cinq has great promise. I like the idea of my vacation and holiday pictures getting home before I do. I really like the ability to access your iPhoto library remotely and download or forward pictures from it to others. If that's all the app did it would be worth a download. Give Cinq a try and see if it is useful to you. When uploads are sped up, Cinq will be a killer app. Cinq requires Mac OS X 10.5 or greater, Windows XP, or Windows Vista/7. On the iPhone side, it requires iOS 4.2 or later.
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