Hipstamatic 300 and the .aae ‘bug’

So Hipstamatic leveraged Apple’s .aae xml files to include develop instructions for the ‘raw’ jpegs it produces. This is all well and good, as long as you’re looking at the iPhone and only at the iPhone, but just as with Snapseed before it, you have to jump through hoops to get the pictures onto your mac.

Here are a couple of screenshots of some test shots I took earlier, as they are in the iPhone’s Camera Roll.

The one on the left was shot with the Classic mode; the one on the right was shot with in the fancy new Pro mode and edited with the same lens/film combo as the Classic image, then explicitly exported.

Now, here’s a screenshot of them as they are in Capture One Pro:

So the one on the left is the unedited one from the Pro camera, the one in the middle is the edited and exported one from the Pro camera; the one on the right is the one from the Classic camera.

There are two workarounds:

1. AirDrop or DropBox or Google Drive, or some other method that forces the phone to create a jpeg with the .aae instructions baked in, or
2. explicitly export the photo from Hipstamatic via the ‘Save as Copy’ function. To enable this, you have to go into the Settings and choose ‘Always Ask’ (in Hipstamatic 301) because the Always Save as Copy setting just saves a new .aae file over top of the original. Then when you go to save, it will ask you if you want to save as a Version or a Copy: choose Copy and you’ll get a shiny new jpeg with all your changes baked in.

I hate workarounds of this type, but it looks like that’s what we get to do, at least until software programs start reading the .aae files properly.

I half thought maybe El Capitan would bring support for Apple’s .aae files to Image Capture and Photos, but alas: no such luck. It broke something such that Image Capture and Lightroom can only intermittently see photos on the iPhone, so that’s a big pain.

Anyway. If you’re wondering why your computer doesn’t see the Hipstamatified pictures, the .aae sidecars are your answer, and AirDrop is (for me) the easiest way to get things over.