A five day road trip in Thailand may not be considered as a sufficiently robust test of the iPad as a photographer’s assistant; but it’s the best I can do unless someone is prepared to sponsor a six week tour of Iceland.
What you need:
- A camera
- An iPad
- An iPad camera connection kit
The latter is a somewhat contentious add-on for the iPad. Some feel that a slot to read cards should be built into the device. I can see that this would require additional internal space, weaken the overall structure, and provide a second hole to fill up with dust. If I didn’t intend to use it, I would rather my iPad didn’t have it. So I am quite happy with the camera connection kit, I just think it should come free with the iPad.
What you get in the camera connection kit are two devices that plug into the iPad. One accepts the SD memory card found in most smaller cameras. The other one contains a USB port, into which you an plug a card reader for non-SD cards; such as the CF card I use in my Canon 1D. This device will also accept some other USB devices, including keyboards.
As I was only taking my GF1 on the trip, I only needed the SD card reader, and of course the gentleman’s travelling companion.
The iPad as a back-up device
So, off we went and on the first day I snapped a couple of hundred photos. Take the card out of the camera, stick it into the device and plug it into the iPad. The photo application automatically opens with a new tab marked “camera”, and thumbnails of your photos are displayed. You can’t review the photos at more than thumbnail size at this point. Touch “Import all” and all the photos on the card will be imported to your iPad.
If you don’t do anything else photographically with the iPad, backing up your photos is a significant benefit. Here you are, on your six week tour of Iceland, paid for by the grateful readers of Pattayadays, and you are capturing staggeringly beautiful images on your tiny SD card. What if you lose the card? What if it fails (they do, occasionally)? A photographer only feels comfortable when his or her photos are backed up somewhere. So, stick them on the iPad and now you have a copy. Just don’t lose the iPad and the SD card.
Unfortunately, I had pretty much filled my 16GB iPad with entertainment options in case I was stuck alone while she who must be obeyed dealt with family business (something that never happened); so I did not have enough space to back-up everything. Instead I selected the photos I wanted to use with my blog and imported those.
You will notice that each of my photos has “RAW+JPG” noted on it. This is recognising that I have set my camera to produce both RAW and JPG images from a single shot (if you have no idea what I am on about, may I recommend page 40 onwards of the dubious Pattaya Days Starter Guide to Photography?). The good news is that the iPad is quite happy to interpret and display RAW images from most cameras. The bad news is that, if you import an image that has been captured in both RAW and JPG, you can only view and work with the JPG image. So if you chose to shoot the JPG in black and white, that is what you are stuck with in the iPad, no way to get to the colour image in RAW.
So now you have your imported images on the iPad; and it’s great to be able to browse through your photos at the end of a day of shooting; photos do look very good on the device. They reside in albums called “Last import” and “All imported”, and now would be a good time to break them out into albums called “The belching volcano” and “The rutting Icelandic ponies”; but you can’t. The Photos application is extremely limited in this regard. It will kick off a fine slideshow, but there is very little you can do to select what it includes in the show. Naturally, “there’s an app for that” (Photo-sort), but Photos needs beefing up to do more. Maybe they will give us iPhoto for the iPad at some point.
Home again after an excellent tour of Iceland, and time to put all those photos onto your computer. You could work through the fifteen memory cards you filled; but a quicker solution would be to just plug in your iPad and load from there. Lightroom treats the iPad the same as a memory card, and transfers are quick.
Great! Your 3,000 photos were safely backed-up on your iPad during your trip, and have now been transferred to your computer for further processing. Time to clear them off your iPad. So all you need to do is….oh dear.
The Photos application provides no means to mass delete your imported photos. You can view an individual photo and delete it; but you won’t want to do that 3,000 times. A very slightly quicker method is to select the sharing button on the top right of an album.
And then touch each photo you want to delete. Still a load of work.
If you use iPhoto, this is not a problem because you can choose to delete the photos from the iPad after the import. This is not an option for Lightroom. Fortunately, for Mac users, there is an alternative. Open the Image Capture application on your Mac, highlight the photos in your iPad, and click Delete. (For Windows users, I have no idea. Buy a Windows tablet instead perhaps. That was a joke).
Still, not good enough Mr. Jobs; we need an option to mass delete imported photos on the iPad please.
So, with some workarounds, the iPad does the job as a back-up storage device. I would like to be able to look at my RAW and JPG files separately, would like to be able to organise my photos so I can show them off with slideshows while on the road, and it should be a whole lot easier to mass delete on the iPad. Apart from that, I think I have an excellent justification to purchase a 64GB iPad when the next version comes around.
The iPad as a photo-related blogging tool
I wanted to post to Pattaya Days while I was away, and I wanted to see how easy it was on the iPad. Let’s deal with the photo aspect first.
First thing was to prepare a photo for including in the blog. In some cases, the original photo was OK, but in other cases I wanted to do a bit of cropping or exposure tweaking. Once again the Photos application falls short by offering zero processing tools. But once again “there’s an app for that”, in fact there are many offerings in the app store to help with processing your photos. Photogene, Filterstorm and PhotoPal all offer some surprisingly sophisticated tools. I tended to use PhotoPal, which is a simple app for making simple changes. Photo tweaking complete, time to move it to the web.
As you may be aware, I keep my photos on Flickr. One of the many ways you can get your photos into Flickr is to email them to a unique address that drops them into your photo collection, so that is what I did. Photogene, Filterstorm, PhotoPal and the iPad Photos app, all include an option to mail a photo; so it was an easy process. Mailed photos are automatically reduced in size to make them appropriate for mailing, but the image is still more than large enough to use on Pattaya Days. If you feel the need to mail a full-size photo, then you can always copy the original and paste it into a mail. If you are so inclined, the photo apps can also post your photo to Facebook or Twitter.
Next step was to write the words and, as I wasn’t always online, I used Pages. Once online I went to Flickr to extract the photo URLs and pasted them into Pages. Then I copied the complete post and pasted it into Wordpress. Initially I used the Wordpress app; but that contains a nasty bug which results in a new post over-writing an old post; such that the rather amusing story of she who must be obeyed searching for a statue on a local island is now lost forever. So I just used Wordpress via the browser. Preparing blog posts on the iPad was easy.
My five day test has confirmed to me that the iPad works as a photo backup device, as a medium for reviewing and enjoying the shots you have taken, and for sharing selected photos. More work required on the Photos application, but OS4 for the iPad is coming soon and maybe there will be a nice surprise.
However, I do feel that my test was compromised by being too brief; such that a six week tour of Iceland will be required. Please send money.
Comments 🔗
2010-08-04| genuinej saysI’d stay well clear of Iceland if I were you. Too many volcanoes and volcanic ash and it’s effing cold. A temperature sensitive chap such as your good self couldn’t possibly survive. Especially for six weeks.
2010-08-05| Barry saysVery informative. You could sell your photos to raise money to go to Iceland by laying a sheet down on Beach Road and displaying them there. Plenty of ladies there without much to do would gather around and attract a crowd for you. You could even hire a couple of pretties to draw in the punters.
2010-08-05| Spike saysgenuinej, you are probably right. I did have a holiday there in my younger, pre-photography days; and it was stunning. My son has been back and taken many amazing photos. But I would probably just shiver.
Barry, I have noticed the ladies on beach road. Do you think they would love me long time?
2010-08-05| Camberley says
Money sent for Iceland.
I am beginning to be a be a bit put off the iPad. Move positive comments please.
Doesn’t Lightroom have an option to Move rather than Copy so deleting the file from the source?
Re 1. As if.
2010-08-05| Spike says
Hasn’t arrived yet. Send more.
It’s by far the best gadget I have ever bought. Would not swap it for a laptop. I use it extensively every day.
Yes, but it is greyed out on an import from the iPad.
My faith in you is shattered.
Sent from my iPad via my phone wifi hotspot while sat in a cafe.
2010-08-05| Barry saysJust offer them a couple of free photos and tell them they were taken by someone famous and they will gain face by displaying them in their toilet.
2010-08-05| Lloyd saysOne thing that Apple has managed to do so well is sell “accptable compromise”. People accept their products yet are unable to do half of what they really want to do and yet they are happy because things look so pretty and its “kewl” to have a funky new toy not many people have.
A year ago not a sole in the world would have accepted a netbook type divice with only 32Gb ram and limited functionality, hell i have memory sticks with larger storagw, now its acceptable, go figure!
Now for the up side, getting paid to write a trading floor app for use on the iPad and seeing whats possible in the workplace shows that Apple had a good starying product with a lot of potential ;-)
2010-08-06| Billy saysLloyd, oh dear, I feel a grammar/spelling lesson from GJ coming on :-(
2010-08-06| Spike saysLloyd, you really are a glass half-empty kind of guy; please cheer up. And learn to spell.
Oh, and I am a pensioner who drives a truck, I really don’t care about what is considered “kewl”.
2010-08-06| Lloyd saysNo more of a “why settle for less” kinda guy. Would you rather the stunning looking bar girl who would only do half of the things you wanted or the average girl who will do everything you want and more?
Sorry about the typing swapped from iPhone 4 to 3Gs and cant get used to old size keys.
Btw have you tried Opera Mini on the iPad?
2010-08-07| Tomas Rineer saysWhy did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. Ill post it again. Hello , I have been using a brilliant way to make a lot of money online creating blogs. I presume this is mainly for the website administrator but there are probably alot more bloggers reading this. I have already made thousands using the techniques detailed in the product and it’s only been 2 months. Oh, and now you have removed the link so this comment is worthless!
2010-08-13| Mark Sutherland saysPositive comments about the I-Pad, Camberley?
Photos look absolutely stunning on the I-Pad’s superb quality screen. And I love the way you can flick through them, zoom in or out on the screen, etc. Extreemly portable, GREAT battery life, especially compared to my old dinosaur laptop.
I haven’t tried importing photos or editing on the I-Pad yet, as I don’t have the dongle. In fact, I didn’t even know there was one until I read something by Marc Shultz and then this post. I will have to get one as soon as I next pass by an Apple store!
I-Pads are great. Now I just want someone to bring one out that allows me to use my pen stylus on it (for photoshop).