News A useful and revealing review of iPhoto for iPad

I downloaded it before my trip to New York and after playing around for an hour or two, completely wrote it off. I guess I missed most of what was there. Although my need is far less urgent at the moment (non-existent actually), it sounds like it would do me some good to get up to speed on it. I totally missed the ability to mark "favorites" and segregate them to a folder to work on while jettisoning the rest. Although it sounds like this may be its own personal library that you can't work on from any other app. But I'll bet there's a workaround - I'll have to check it out.

Thanks for posting this...

-Ray
 
I played with it tonight and it definitely has some power, but not really the kind of editing features I like that much. I guess I'm more in tune with the Nik way of doing things. The writer slags off Snapseed as "something you play with", but I processed my whole New York trip with it and have only had to reprocess a handful so far with the full size apps on my Mac. I'm sure I'll do a few more, particularly the B&W shots I did earlier in the trip before the Snapseed update improved its B&W tools a bit. I think snapseed is a fairly serious tool with a lot of function and easy to use. The writer also notes "The relationship between your iPad’s photo library and iPhoto’s internal library is a little confusing." I think that's true of ANY app I've tried so far, including Photogene, and is the fundamental problem with the ipad's organizational tools (or lack thereof). The main thing I want from an app (as long as I continue to "play" with snapseed as an editor) is a good organizing tool that easily allows me to sort through a couple hundred photos, identify the 10-20 worth keeping, and then trash the rest. All of these apps create their own private little vaults when you select photos - photogene at least allows you to save a batch of photos back out to the iPad's basic photo organizing system in a new album - VERY useful to me. The problem is you can only view thumbnails, not full size photos while sorting. iPhoto lets you view the full shot and tag the ones you want to keep, but if you want to get it out to the ipad root system, you have to export the images, ONE AT A TIME, which is very time consuming. And then once you've done that in either program and want to trash the original folder/import, you have to go through and individually select all of the photos you want to select - there's no "select all" option - this is the ipad's issue though - not caused by any of the apps. The ipad has some fundamental organizational issues that really bug me when I'm using it heavily. Each app seems to have some way of trying to deal with it (shapseed doesn't even try - its just an editor/processor, not an organizer), but none of them really overcome the designed in limitations of the device.

I'll keep playing with them and checking them out though - maybe I'll find something by the time I do a month of shooting in some future year. While home, though, i really don't use the ipad for photos much at all, so its all just research for now.

-Ray
 
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