PictBridge is a standard for transferring photos from digital cameras to modern printers - and many Nokia S60 devices (and quite a few Series 40 feature phones too) fully support it. You'll know if your phone is PictBridge compatible because, when you plug in the miniUSB or microUSB lead, one of the options will be 'Image Print'. On the printer side, just about every single printer on the market is full PictBridge compatible - see the long list here, for example.
Here's how PictBridge helped me when I was in a rush earlier today.
9:30am. I wanted to get a spare part for some plumbing in my loft and, being relatively useless at DIY, decided that the best way to tell the guy in the shop what I needed was to use my N95 to snap the appropriate part. Up the ladder I went, snap went the N95.
9:31am. Ah. How was I going to get from the N95's memory card to a printed photo. Sit there and do a PC Suite Image Store and then open the file in Paintshop Pro, set up page margins and then fiddle with the printer settings in order to select the 'photo' tray? Not on your life, there was a FAR faster way. PictBridge. Spotting the USB port on the front of my HP printer, I whipped the PC cable from the side of my laptop and inserted it into the printer instead.
9:32am. Up on the N95's screen comes a prompt. I select 'Image Print'. Almost immediately the printer responds with 'PictBridge device detected'.
9:33am. In Gallery on the N95, the photo I'd just taken was loaded on-screen by default. Selecting the 'Print photo' icon brought up a 'Image print' dialog, showing a preview of what would be printed.
9:34am. I hit 'Options | Print' and a few seconds later the printer starts whirring, loading up its photo tray automatically and starting to print.
9:35am. I had the finished 6" by 4" print in my hand and I was out the door on the way to the plumbers merchant.
You can see how PictBridge managed to save me a lot of time here!
Interestingly, Nokia's Nseries Image Print routines also allow you to print thumbnails, either 4 or 9 to a page, of photos on your memory card. This might come in very useful when on holiday and wanting to show friends or relatives the sorts of thing you've snapped so far - just select one of the thumbnail options in Settings, plug into any PictBridge-compatible printer and go!
Selecting multiple images in Gallery using the pencil/hash key... then hit 'Options/Print'
You can browse through the images in a selected set... then choose the number of images per page in 'Settings'... and here's the page preview...
So, wherever you are when you want to print a photo (or sheet of thumbnails), remember PictBridge. There's bound to be a compatible printer and a miniUSB lead you can borrow in most homes and offices - just plug in and print!
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 2 July 2008