I arrived safely in rural Italy with only my wife’s Apple iPad as view and backup my photos.
The iPad Safari web browser will not let me write this blog post in visual mode as keyboard would not display so I changed to HTML mode and it worked – thank goodness for that!
I inserted my camera SD card into the iPad camera connection kit’s SD card reader and 3 out of 4 tries the iPad gives an error message “device is not supported” but by persisting one can import all photos quite quickly into the iPad as it makes a new “Event” folder each time you run an import.
just be careful not to accidentally hit the delete option which will wipe your SD card even though it seems that the RAW files and original size JPEGs have probably NOT been imported!
It looks as though the iPad imports only resized and degraded versions of your images as zooming it reveals FAR LESS DETAIL than is visible on the camera’s LCD screen!
It is very nice to show your friends and have a quick check of your photo but it is USELESS for checking image sharpness!
Time to resort to my workaround option – the ZoomIt SD card reader.
At least with this you CAN import original images and RAW files BUT there are a couple of big problems:
1. It imports files at a snail paced 0.1mb/sec which is far too slow to backup all your raw files – that is 2 minutes for each 12 mb raw file!
2. Although you have imported the original jpeg, you can only view a severely degraded and resized jpeg – even more degraded than the iPad’s SD card reader import degradation! This makes analysis of these images USELESS!
In addition, you must separately charge the ZoomIt SD card reader prior to use.
I have decided to just use the ZoomIt to import my favorite RAW files and will have to find another option to backup my images.
One could back up images to online storage but at 15Gb per week on my travels, I would spend all week uploading them!
So it looks like lots of memory cards and perhaps buying a portable media player HDD 🙁
You should have grabbed a net book or a colorspace hyperdrive UDMA or one of their newer products. Vosonic also makes some picture storage and viewer devices.
What made you think the apple toy would be anywhere near useful for anything serious? Thay are for city folk to make fashion statements, not to be useful.
Also, maybe look at an Archos tablet. They run Android and are fairly cool looking.
I’m surprised you even took it on your trip without reading comments by other photographers or having the time to try it out first. Seems like you should of discovered some of this earlier.
Don’t let it get to you though. Enjoy the trip!
I agree with you unfortunately, I had to get something to keep my wife happy as she only wanted to surf net and do emails and Apple did not advertise the degree to which they crippled the iPad!
Also, I spent 40 hours baking it up before I left so did not get time to experiment with image processing side 🙁
Anyway, it does make a good device to browse your photos, just no good for backing them up or pixel peeping to decide which ones to delete.
I just got back from a trip to the UK and US.
I took a 16gig card and a 32gig card.
My plan was to keep my images on the card, but make safety copies to a computer and drive (yeah, very bulky).
We were making music, so ended up with enormous files to save. This was done overnight in our hotel room.
Maybe a back up strategy for the slow ZoomIt? Set it going and go out to dinner, or go to bed.