importation

We're about to move to our new place up in the hills but we have a few more days to go.  My vacation has begun though so that means ... Time to update the blog!

I know at least some of you have been wondering whether an iPad would make sense for their needs instead of a laptop.  So I plan to have several posts about using the iPad for different tasks that I've been doing, and how it has been better or worse than what I was using before, which was a laptop docked to a monitor, keyboard and mouse (essentially your typical PC). For this update I will focus on one of the functions for the iPad that I mentioned before:  managing and working with photos.  I have to say, that so far the abilities of the iPad are a little disappointing for me for this function.

Before I get into the details let me talk about what my typical photo workflow is in the context of the previous setup, using my laptop.  I take photos with my Nikon D5000, and I want to offload them from my memory card.  I use a USB card reader, and plugging in the SD card kicks open Google's Picasa image management software (which is free).  From there I can copy the images over to the laptop's drive, and back them up to      an external drive.  Then Picasa lets me review my images, delete the ones I don't like, and tag (star) the ones I like.  I can also adjust basic things like brightness, contrast, white balance, as well as rotate and crop the photos all within Picasa.  

Typically that's all I need to do with my photos, but if I need to, I'll open the photo up in PhotoShop if I want to do anything more advanced like touching up the photo, removing items from the picture, stuff like that.  If I want to use multiple photos together (for instance in my San Francisco series) to build a panorama I use Autostitch, another free app.  Save the file, and then it's back to Picasa.

From Picasa I can organize the photos into folders, and upload them to Picasa online so that I can share the photos with everyone.  I also have accounts with Photobucket and Flickr, but for those I just upload through the web browser.  And then I may publish the photos or links to them on this Blog or on Facebook.  That's about it, 99% of the time.  I very rarely print my photos but if I do I will pick them out using the Picasa viewer and export them to send to the printer.   

Ok, so let's move over to the iPad workflow.  I pop the SD card out of the camera just like before, and use the Apple Camera Connection Kit for the iPad.  Plugging it in automatically launches the iPad's Photos app, and it lets you select which photos to copy over from the card.  Like Picasa the app tells you if your images are duplicates of what's already on the iPad.  You can select everything with one button or tap individually on each photo to select it, and then start the copy process.  However in Photos you can't import the photos into a folder or name the folder.  They just all go into the Photos area.

Once they're imported you view them in Photos as well.  But you only have a few limited ways to sort or view them.  You can't actually move them into another folder or album on the iPad.  There are three views.  

1.  Photos view shows you everything you've got stored on the iPad, unsorted or grouped.  If you have 500+ photos loaded on your iPad, that's a lot of scrolling around through the thumbnails to find the photo you want.  
2.  The Albums view is misleading for me, because you can't actually organize your photos in this view or create any new Albums on the iPad.  It shows you any albums that you've created on your PC or Mac and then copied over to your iPad using the synch feature in iTunes.  In this view all your photos that you've imported through the Camera Connection Kit are    all lumped into an "all imported" album, and there's a separate album called "last imported" for the most recent set you imported.  Then there's a separate album called "saved photos" which contains all other non-imported photos, such as ones you save from the web while browsing, or images that are saved from other apps, whether they are drawings from a 3rd party doodle app or edited photos from a 3rd party editing app.
3.  The last view is Events which basically as far as I can tell, groups the photos you've imported based on what date you imported them.  Even photos taken on the same date, if imported to the iPad on different days, will go into separate Events in this view.

What else can you do in the Photos app?  Not a whole lot.  You can view and delete a photo, and you can email it, or copy it to the iPad clipboard.  You can upload a photo to your MobileMe gallery if you have an account.  No renaming files, no sorting into albums and no tagging.  And to back up the photos to another drive, you have to connect the iPad to your PC or Mac and do a backup through iTunes.  You can't connect the iPad to an external drive to back up the photos directly.  
    
Did you catch all of that?  To me it doesn't make much sense. The organizational function of the Photos app is very weak and I find it frustrating to work with.  It seems like the answer is to sort and organize on your PC or Mac and then synch over to the iPad but that kind of defeats the purpose of having the Camera Connection kit.   I guess if a good 3rd party app was out there that could take the place of the Photos app and add better functionality, that could solve this.  Or I hope that Apple improves the app with future updates.  

Well, let's take a look at the rest of the tasks I wanted to do.  I've been using Adobe's PS Express and Zagg Photo Pad for my photo editing needs. Both are very good for free apps.  The touch interface is kind of neat for adjustment sliders and for cropping photos, but sometimes lacks the precision of a mouse.  I also bought the IOS version of Autostitch ($2.99) for making panoramas.  These are all very cool but I do feel they fall a bit short of their PC counterparts.
  
I can't believe there isn't Picasa for iPad yet but I got the 3rd party app Web Albums which is ok for uploading pics.  There's also a Photobucket app which is pretty good for both viewing and uploading on the Photobucket site.    The closed nature of the iPad's file system prevents you from simply uploading a file through the web browser to sites like Picasa, Photobucket or Flickr.  You need to either have an app that supports uploading to the site or use tricks like emailing in a file if the site has that option.  Once you've got the images up there, linking to them in Blogger or Facebook is a little trickier on the iPad than on PC due to the wonky copy and paste functions, but it can be done. 

So most of the same abilities are there on the iPad, but there is that one glaring issue for me.  What I really want is a way to manage the photo albums on the iPad without going back to the PC.  Maybe this limitation is there by Apple's design, because the storage on the iPad is very finite and they may be trying to make the case for more cloud-based storage and sharing.  That's where the apps like Web Albums and Photobucket come in.  But coming from the PC world I can't help but think that so far, in this particular arena, the iPad falls short of the PC's power.