Leica is to produce a dedicated FOTOS app designed specifically for the iPad. This was revealed in a letter to a customer which was reproduced here on Leica Rumors.
With the latest operating system upgrade, Apple has created iPadOS to free the tablet from the restrictions imposed by a one-size-fits-all smartphone/tablet system. As I know from personal experience, the latest iPadOS running on my iPad Pro takes tablet computing to a whole new level.
It is so impressive that, for the first time, I can envisage being able to do almost all my work on the tablet. I have shelved plans to replace my old MacBook, which was used exclusively for travel, and now intend to rely on the iPad.
Until iPadOS arrived, I found it very difficult to work with the WordPress application when created posts for Macfilos. The biggest problem for me under the old system was the
So far I have not experimented with using the iPad for photo processing. I still import exclusively to Lightroom on my MacBook Pro. Now, with iPadOS, there is support for external drives and I shall be exploring ways of importing direct to applications rather than having to rely on Apple Photos. Any tips and workflow details from readers will be very welcome since it isn’t an area I have explored.
Distancing the iPad from the iPhone makes a lot of sense and opens up opportunities for greater synergy between MacOS and
I shoot Raw/jpg pairs and used to need a hugely complicated workflow to get them into Lightroom on the iPad. LR still can’t import them directly, but with an intermediate step I can import them much more easily than before. Although LR can’t (yet) see the external card reader, it can read from files stored on the iPad. So I first import from the SD card into a temporary folder on the iPad, and then import the Raw/jpg pairs from there into LR. Presumably the steps could be automated (including deleting the temporary folder afterwards) with a Shortcut, although I haven’t tried that.
Thanks for this, Keith.
After some testing the Shortcuts app may be the way to go, at the moment, in order to import directly from the SD card into Lightroom on the iPad. Create a Shortcut with two steps: (a) add the Get File action – leave the service as the default iCloud Drive and enable both Show Document Picker and Select Multiple if not already enabled), and (b) add the Import to Lightroom action.
Run this, navigate to the SD card when the Document Picker shows up and select the images to import. Press ‘Open’ and not ‘Done’. The images then show up in Recently Added in LR. This worked fine for a couple of images but when I tried it with a dozen the Shortcut gave a message ‘operation took too long to complete’, yet the images still showed up in LR. Hopefully the glitches will be sorted out and LR will actually show external drives in their Add Photos action.
I wonder if the new iPadOS will run on my 5 year old iPad mini… I’m running 13.2 beta on the iPhone XS and that’s quite lovely. The Fotos app runs fine on it.
The concept is great however we will have to wait and see what the implementation is like.
After my experience with the Q2 and gps metadata synchronisation I will believe it when I see it.
Never got it to work with an iPhone. Why should it work with an iPad? What would one use this for? To misquote Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum on fox hunting, this is like ‘the unworkable in pursuit of the unwanted’.
William
(Need an extra syllable there, William, to make it really work. How about ‘the unworkable in pursuit of the unwarranted’?)
Isn’t that what the Taoiseach just tweeted to London?
Thanks David. I had to match ‘uneatable’ and could not think of anything. Mike, your lot were always better at megaphone diplomacy than ours. I see that the tradition carries on under BJ.
William
Let’s see: would our ScanSnap document scanner connect to an iPad? ..there isn’t even any software for it to work with the latest upcoming macOS, so I doubt it.
Could all these (oldish) Firewire hard drives, with hours and hours of video on them, connect to my iPad ..and could I edit the video on them with my existing macOS tools (Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime 7, SoundSoap, iDVD, Turbo.264 HD, VLC, etc)? No, I don’t think so.
What about my old Polaroid GL10 printer app? RescuePRO to retrieve deleted photos from SD cards? All those other photo editing and film scanning apps (Silverfast, Silkypics, Canon Digital Photo Professional, the Nikon scanner app, the Olympus ES10 scanner app, VueScan, Olympus Digital Camera Updater, Topaz Sharpen)..?
No, I don’t think so.
Moving to an iPad Pro from a 13″ MacBook Air doesn’t seem sensible – for me. The screens are a similar size (12.9″ iPad Pro, 13″ MacBook Air), but what about my two USB sockets (for external USB sticks), my SD card slot (built in) and my Thunderbolt socket (which lets me connect to more USB and to Firewire drives)..? Oh, and what about my (tactile, moving-key) keyboard?
Nice idea for just editing photos, with the photo-editing apps which are available for the iPad Pro. But for all the rest of the jobs I use my Mac for (..’Jobs’ ..you got the reference? ..Steve died on Oct 5th, so it’ll be a sad Saturday this week..) nothing comes close.
David,
I didn’t say I could do without my MacBook Pro (for several of the reasons you outline, including my ScanSnap), but the point I was making is that the iPad has now reached prime time for travel. I feel I no longer need a small laptop for that purpose. Time will tell, however.
Jobs noted. History tends to follow me. In 1989 I was in Berlin when the Wall fell. And in 2011 I was actually inside the Apple Store on the Apple campus in Cupertino when Steve “passed” (to coin a euphemism). Am I a jinx?
Nowadays I have my email on my phone, so I can receive email (as well as text) on it and reply on it. But I don’t like typing on the teeny-screen iPhone keyboard ..so I reply on my Mac when I get home. I wouldn’t want to reply to email on my iPad, either ..as – for me – it’s just a really big iPhone.
If I did music editing, then maybe the iPPRO would be a great alternative to an MBP.
But I don’t edit photos on the move ..when I’m travelling. I take photos, but I leave any editing – and I don’t do much adjustment to photos anyway – till when I get home.
I don’t use ‘anti-social media’ (Twitter, FaceBook), and I don’t upload photos to that sort of ‘group chat’ ..so I really have no need to use an iPad for photos, except to show them to people sometimes. But if I’m going to carry an iPad for that, then I might as well carry the similar sized – but slightly heavier, though more versatile – MBP.
[..And talking of significant dates, did I mention that I sold a lens cap – when I worked in a photo shop – at, or on, 12:34, 5/6/’78..? ..Yes, erm, I think I did.]
Er, no Mike, you’re not a jinx.
Indeed, I do remember hearing about about 12345678.