Continuing the theme of ditching the laptop and using only the iPad, at least on holiday, today looking at the iPad as an amateur photographers best friend.
With its massive, bright, screen the iPad is perfect for viewing photos and coupled with the camera kit it is unbeatable. I have been able to hook up a number of cameras using both the USB and SD connectors, including getting pictures off the iPhone. The iPad has recognised them all and imported successfully. This process is painless and then using the existing photo app it is possible to view and enjoy. Unfortunately the options for managing the photos on the iPad are limited, something I hope that Apple or a third party address in future.
Once the photos are on the iPad it is useful to be able to manipulate them and I have found a few apps that allow you to do that as follows:
Flickr
In order to share my photos I use the Flickr service. They provide a free app that allows you to both view and upload photos to your account. Unfortunately at present this is only an iPhone app but I am sure this will change at some point in the future. The app works well but I couldn’t get it to upload the photos in any size other than about 640×480, even when set on maximum resolution.
Photo Layout
A simple but effective free app for creating collages. You add the photos from your library and then pinch and zoom to move, scale and rotate the pictures into the positions you want. There are buttons for moving the current picture above or below those around it or you can simply touch it to bring it to the top. A good example of what can be created is shown below:
Retouch
This is the only app I paid for and only did so after reading through a few negative reviews and ignoring them! I’m glad I did as Retouch makes what can be a time consuming task simple – that is to remove areas of pictures you don’t want. See the example below where the crane has been removed. This is a simple example and could have been done with in a painting app with a suitable blue colour but Retouch makes the process easy and also worked on more challenging images too. Well worth the small price.
PhotoPad
The last app is another free one that is more generalist. PhotoPad allows you to do operations such as scale, crop, rotate etc as well as applying filters and effects. Great for putting the finishing touches to your photos.
All in all I have been greatly impressed with the iPads photo handling capabilities. The third party apps make it easy to work with photos to get the best results. My biggest criticism would be that the camera kit should be built into the iPad. Apart from that it is perfect.