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:
1. A camera
2. An iPad
3. 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.

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And then touch each photo you want to delete. Still a load of work.

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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.