Thursday, 7 April 2011

Mobile photo-editing

The iPad is brilliant for photos. It has a large, high-res screen, with great zoom. It is easy to switch between albums so you can show off the kids' pics to the grandparents, and the hens night pics to your mates (and not the other way around). And you can carry more pics with you than you'd look at in a year.

With the addition of the iPad Camera Connection kit, you can download pics from your camera either directly, or from the SD card (but not Compact Flash card). (I got mine for AU$30 from JB HiFi (RRP AU$35), Amazon sells them for US$30.)

With these natty doodads, you can retrieve the pics from your camera to your iPad, and review them using a 10" screen, rather than the tiny one on the back of your camera. With a wifi or 3G connection, you can then upload them to a webhost (Picasa, Flickr, Dropbox etc), so that at least you don't lose your pics if the airline loses your bag.

And with the right app, you can edit your pics on the move, so you can post them to your blog (or your Mum).

Did you see that word there, the one that will make all the difference?
And with the right app ...
Can you see it now?

So I tried Adobe Photoshop Express. Price is right (free), and it was well rated. And it might work brilliantly.  But I'll never know because it can't open photos I've taken with my camera. It complains they're too big (TWSS). So I deleted it.

I then did what I should have done earlier, and googled "iPad photo edit app" and found a few suggestions, including from this page, and this page.

PhotoPad by ZAGG is another free option that I haven't explored fully, again because it objects to the size of my raw images.  It scores an extra point on the Photoshop Express, because rather than simply saying "too big, piss off", it offers to resize the raw image so it can open it. If my budget was extra-tight, I might examine it further.  As it is, it's out of the running.

I ended up going with Photogene, and it seems to do what I need, but I haven't given it a full workout yet. I'll let you know how I get on.

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