The Boston PDA User Group

The iPad Tour: Uploading Photos at 196mph!

I am currently writing this on the TGV high speed rail (at 196 mph!) in France, heading to Nice, after spending 3 weeks in the UK, and France, flying back home tomorrow (and with any luck, at bospdaug next Tuesday)

One of my goals for this trip was to shoot photos with my digital camera, and store, edit and upload photos using my only computer, the iPad. (Here's a photo of Seamus and family just uploaded to flickr) 

bospdaug UK

Before the trip, I did a lot of research on what software/hardware/config to use-- and have been using the combination of running the camera in RAW+jpg mode, where I get a reduced size jpeg, as well as the raw output of the sensor, using the camera connection kit to upload from the sd card to the iPad, and on the iPad running PhotoGene for photo editing, and flickstackr for uploading jogs to my flickr page.

I've also brought along two 16GB sd cards, and two 8GB cards for the camera. As you know, I have acquired local 3G cards in the UK, and France-- however, I have uploaded to flickr mostly using local wifi, but sometimes with 3G, mainly in the UK where 3G is a lot cheaper! Truth be told, the iPad is a few bug fixes,and feature implementations away from being a true photagrapher's tool for use with raw photos.

First, I have discovered there is a very nasty bug in the iPad photo app-- it will regularly crash while downloading photos with the connection kit (and sometimes kernel panic with auto reboot) 

This crash happens anywhere from 1-3 images  into the download from the sd card to the iPad... and you're then forced to have the photo app rescan your card again, which can take many minutes... But then occasionally it just magically works, and all is well. The trick is to just be patient, and keep retrying until all the photos are transferred.

About a third of the way through the trip, I used a friend's MacBook to pull all the raw files off the iPad, and upload them to a server in the US using conventional transfer, but as of now, my 64GB iPad (mostly emptied of videos beforehand) is full.

While the iPad will store and transfer the raw  files via iPhoto, or Lightroom, Apple does not provide an API to access the raw images on the device-- so any photo app can only access the added jpg, or the crappy jpg in the .dng file, if you don't configure for raw+jpg.

Photogene has been quite reasonable in tweaking images a bit (For example bring up the levels in the blacks in contrasty images, or crop a bit) but I find quite a bit of distortion added if the tools are applied more than just a little.

I think a iPad version of Apeture that supported raw mode, some image resizing,  etc., would be the ultimate solution.

In the meantime, with a little patience, the iPad is quite useful, and viewing photos on the iPad screen while traveling is very nice indeed.