I’m really liking my iPhone 5s and the new capabilities that the camera offers, but I can’t figure out what’s going on with “burst mode”. It appears to take a sequence of photos but how do I flip through them and pick my favorite?
I’m with you that the Apple iPhone 5s has some neat new bells and whistles in the camera department, features that suggest that the basic task of “take a picture” has been solved, so now it’s time to come up with fairly esoteric features that most users will probably ignore or never even know exist on the device. Kinda like the slow-motion video capture. It’s not really fully baked: take a video with this feature enabled and it’s regular speed for the first 5-10 seconds, then slow-motion, then regular speed again just before it ends. Oh, and last time I tested, uploading it to YouTube breaks the slo-mo feature. Weird.
And then there’s burst mode. It took me a while — and some help from my son — to figure out exactly what’s going on with this. Go into the Camera app on the iPhone 5s (no other iPhones seem to have this capability) and when you take a photograph, keep your finger on the button rather than just tapping it. For as long as you’re on the button, it’ll be capturing photos, approx 1-2/second, until you give up or it hits about 190 images.
Then it gets confusing, because when you go look at the photo sequence, you’ll see something that indicates you’re in burst mode and even how many images are in the burst, but without any obvious way to see them:
You can see on the top left “Burst (11 photos)”.
Okay. So how do you see them?
Turns out that you need to tap on the “Favorites…” link on the bottom, at which point a filmstrip appears:
It appears to choose the middle photo of the sequence by default (as you can see along the bottom thumbnails) but you can swipe back and forth to see the differences between the images.
Get to the end and it’s clear you can’t go any further:
Pick the one you like best, then tap on the small circle on the lower right to select it:
You can select more than one from the burst if you like, which is great for capturing difficult action shots like your child jumping, running past, a car flashing by, a fleeing smile on a baby’s face, etc.
Once you’ve done that, tap “Done” on the top right and you’ve got a new image:
Subtle, but neat. As far as I have ascertained, there’s no way to discard the burst photos you don’t want, so in the interest of space, don’t take too many 190 image bursts!
I used Windows to delete unwanted photos from Burst Mode. I connected my iPhone 5s to my Windows 8.1 PC. I opened Windows Explorer and opened the iPhone folder, drilled down to Internal Storage – DCIM. The sub-folders of DCIM contain the .JPG files for each photo. Each photo from Burst Mode appears as an individual .JPG file.
I had taken pictures during a dramatic thunderstorm at night, using Burst Mode to try to capture a shot of a lightning bolt. I had 100s of black, empty photos. I selected large sequences of them using Shift-click in Windows and then pressing Delete. I used my 23″ monitor to view each remaining photo in detail to select the ones I wished to save and deleted the others.
The iPhone Photos app now showed Burst Mode photos with only the handful of photos that I had not deleted in Windows. I clicked Choose Favorites and selected all photos that remained in the Burst Mode and clicked Done. Now, each photo became a separate photo with no more Burst Mode.
Do you want to keep all photos or just the favorites? Depending on what you choose it throws the unwanted ones out…