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I went on vacation recently and decided to just take an iPad and my camera. I got one of the new regular iPads and I had a Lightning -to-SD dongle. When I finis

by Yhippa 8y ago

I went on vacation recently and decided to just take an iPad and my camera. I got one of the new regular iPads and I had a Lightning -to-SD dongle. When I finished a day of shooting I plugged everything in and had the same issues Paul did. I couldn't even view the photos because they had to be imported to Photos on the iPad and I definitely didn't have space to do that. I'm frustrated at how hard it is to do something simple like take pictures off my Canon 6D and make them go straight to the cloud. We live in adapter and dongle hell.

murukesh_s 8y ago
How about android tablets? I haven't used one lately but I believe you can do all fancy stuff there.
- firmgently 8y ago
  On my Android tablet I run Debian in chroot. Full LAMP, i3wm, choice of terminal emulators, Vim, git, real Firefox, real Chromium. I use a Bluetooth keyboard with a trackpoint built in (alternatives with trackpads are available for people who prefer those). Or a Bluetooth mouse of course. I recently bought a Thinkpad Bluetooth keyboard so interface-wise, once I start X I'm basically on a Thinkpad. In the winter when I have to get by on small amounts of electricity (all solar powered here) I use my tablet almost exclusively and earn money with it. I use a bendy arm with a clamp to hold the tablet at a good ergonomic height and closer to my face. In a pinch when power is really low I actually do the same with my Android phone with all the same software, which works surprisingly well at 1920x1080. It ends up filling a similar proportion of my view to a 15" laptop (at the laptop's normal working distance) - although then it's only a few inches away from my eyes when using the phone (shortest focusing distance I can do) so wouldn't be healthy long term. I can plug in my DSLR via a USBOTG dongle and grab photos from it. Or use a MicroSD in the camera via a full-size adaptor, then slot the MicroSD directly into the tablet. Then I can edit directly from RAW in Snapseed. The biggest shortcoming is that I can't use Photoshop as I have an ARM processor. The armhf Debian distribution and packages are amazing and almost everything is there. WINE works but it would need some x86 binaries to run Photoshop, that just don't exist because it's ARM. Artflow in Android is great, as is Snapseed and PhotoEditor (for resizing and basic image adjustments, including batch mode etc). I can run GIMP and Inkflow in Debian but after 20 years using Photoshop they don't come close for me. So when I really have to use Photoshop I have to save up some juice and fire up the laptop. This is all on a 5-year old Sony Xperia Tablet Z. It was good for its time but nowadays there are faster machines with more RAM available. I'm looking forward to when I can justify an upgrade (this is a great tablet in many ways, I have lots of things I need to spend money on and I have been adjusting my work/life balance a lot in recent years so don't earn much). I'm no Google fanboy, for me Apple/Google are just different flavours of very horrible. The difference with Android gear is that the potential is there to use it the way I want - it's possible (and not even that hard). I can root, I can use a pointing device, as opposed to Apple's approach.
graeme 8y ago
Ios 12 has photo import improvements coming: https://m.dpreview.com/news/8289508592/apple-raw-photo-features-update-ios-12 https://m.dpreview.com/news/8289508592/apple-raw-photo-featu...
- jdeibele 8y ago
  Thanks for that link. I take lots of photos and only want to save the best. I bought a lightning->SD card adapter but the Photos app would only show pictures in a grid. I wanted to see them as large as possible so I could pick the one with the fewest number of eyes closed or whatever. "One of the most welcomed new features we’ve come across is the ability to preview your photos full-screen. Before iOS 12, you could only see small thumbnails of photos when importing, which made it all but impossible to select a particular image in a sequence if there wasn’t much visual difference. Now, you can pinch out on a thumbnail and see a full-size preview." That might not work as smoothly as I hope. I'd like to go through 100 photos, all full-size, checking the ones I want. The limiting factor might be that it takes about a second to import each photo. Although you'd think if you were viewing them sequentially it could be loading the next one while you were looking at this one.
bribri 8y ago
There are cameras by sony that enable wireless transfer of full raw images, which I find incredibly convenient for mobile.
walterbell 8y ago
This is caused by Apple’s business model which relies on over-charging for flash memory, so they make it artificially difficult to access external storage that would let you use cheaper iDevices. Sandisk iXpand flash drives have a growing list of compatible iOS applications which can read/write external storage directly. In theory, they could make an iXPand-to-SD adapter, but that would compete with their business model.
throwaway9d0291 8y ago
I just bought an iPad Pro for this exact use case after being disappointed by an Android tablet (Pixel C). The one thing I'll say is that if you _do_ have all the storage you need on the tablet, it's a surprisingly capable device. Affinity Photo and Lightroom are both great for editing and PhotoSync will get the photos to your computer when you're done. The thing I'm still working on now is rating/culling. I don't like deleting things so that's out and I'm not a Lightroom user on desktop so that's out too. I'm hoping to find something that can modify IPTC tags. If you just want to import stuff to the cloud though, you're better off with an Android tablet. It treats an SD adapter just like a PC does so you can use something like Solid Explorer to read directly from the card and write directly to Google Drive or something. Unfortunately though, Android is woeful when it comes to the editing. Snapseed is fantastic but only properly seems to support DNG files, so you have to convert it first. The other downside of Android is I couldn't find a tablet that was guaranteed to have a USB 3 port. They usually just listed "USB-C".

by Yhippa 8y ago

murukesh_s 8y ago

How about android tablets? I haven't used one lately but I believe you can do all fancy stuff there.

firmgently 8y ago
On my Android tablet I run Debian in chroot. Full LAMP, i3wm, choice of terminal emulators, Vim, git, real Firefox, real Chromium. I use a Bluetooth keyboard with a trackpoint built in (alternatives with trackpads are available for people who prefer those). Or a Bluetooth mouse of course. I recently bought a Thinkpad Bluetooth keyboard so interface-wise, once I start X I'm basically on a Thinkpad. In the winter when I have to get by on small amounts of electricity (all solar powered here) I use my tablet almost exclusively and earn money with it. I use a bendy arm with a clamp to hold the tablet at a good ergonomic height and closer to my face. In a pinch when power is really low I actually do the same with my Android phone with all the same software, which works surprisingly well at 1920x1080. It ends up filling a similar proportion of my view to a 15" laptop (at the laptop's normal working distance) - although then it's only a few inches away from my eyes when using the phone (shortest focusing distance I can do) so wouldn't be healthy long term. I can plug in my DSLR via a USBOTG dongle and grab photos from it. Or use a MicroSD in the camera via a full-size adaptor, then slot the MicroSD directly into the tablet. Then I can edit directly from RAW in Snapseed. The biggest shortcoming is that I can't use Photoshop as I have an ARM processor. The armhf Debian distribution and packages are amazing and almost everything is there. WINE works but it would need some x86 binaries to run Photoshop, that just don't exist because it's ARM. Artflow in Android is great, as is Snapseed and PhotoEditor (for resizing and basic image adjustments, including batch mode etc). I can run GIMP and Inkflow in Debian but after 20 years using Photoshop they don't come close for me. So when I really have to use Photoshop I have to save up some juice and fire up the laptop. This is all on a 5-year old Sony Xperia Tablet Z. It was good for its time but nowadays there are faster machines with more RAM available. I'm looking forward to when I can justify an upgrade (this is a great tablet in many ways, I have lots of things I need to spend money on and I have been adjusting my work/life balance a lot in recent years so don't earn much). I'm no Google fanboy, for me Apple/Google are just different flavours of very horrible. The difference with Android gear is that the potential is there to use it the way I want - it's possible (and not even that hard). I can root, I can use a pointing device, as opposed to Apple's approach.

graeme 8y ago

Ios 12 has photo import improvements coming: https://m.dpreview.com/news/8289508592/apple-raw-photo-features-update-ios-12 https://m.dpreview.com/news/8289508592/apple-raw-photo-featu...

jdeibele 8y ago
Thanks for that link. I take lots of photos and only want to save the best. I bought a lightning->SD card adapter but the Photos app would only show pictures in a grid. I wanted to see them as large as possible so I could pick the one with the fewest number of eyes closed or whatever. "One of the most welcomed new features we’ve come across is the ability to preview your photos full-screen. Before iOS 12, you could only see small thumbnails of photos when importing, which made it all but impossible to select a particular image in a sequence if there wasn’t much visual difference. Now, you can pinch out on a thumbnail and see a full-size preview." That might not work as smoothly as I hope. I'd like to go through 100 photos, all full-size, checking the ones I want. The limiting factor might be that it takes about a second to import each photo. Although you'd think if you were viewing them sequentially it could be loading the next one while you were looking at this one.

bribri 8y ago

There are cameras by sony that enable wireless transfer of full raw images, which I find incredibly convenient for mobile.

walterbell 8y ago

This is caused by Apple’s business model which relies on over-charging for flash memory, so they make it artificially difficult to access external storage that would let you use cheaper iDevices. Sandisk iXpand flash drives have a growing list of compatible iOS applications which can read/write external storage directly. In theory, they could make an iXPand-to-SD adapter, but that would compete with their business model.

throwaway9d0291 8y ago

I just bought an iPad Pro for this exact use case after being disappointed by an Android tablet (Pixel C). The one thing I'll say is that if you _do_ have all the storage you need on the tablet, it's a surprisingly capable device. Affinity Photo and Lightroom are both great for editing and PhotoSync will get the photos to your computer when you're done. The thing I'm still working on now is rating/culling. I don't like deleting things so that's out and I'm not a Lightroom user on desktop so that's out too. I'm hoping to find something that can modify IPTC tags. If you just want to import stuff to the cloud though, you're better off with an Android tablet. It treats an SD adapter just like a PC does so you can use something like Solid Explorer to read directly from the card and write directly to Google Drive or something. Unfortunately though, Android is woeful when it comes to the editing. Snapseed is fantastic but only properly seems to support DNG files, so you have to convert it first. The other downside of Android is I couldn't find a tablet that was guaranteed to have a USB 3 port. They usually just listed "USB-C".