Mahalowe

iPad & Photos

About a week ago, my wife gave birth to triplet boys. New babies are wonderful opportunities for taking photos and sharing those photos with friends and family, and of course the demand for photos of triplets is even greater. So as my wife and I were preparing for the C-section and the following stay in the hospital, I decided the iPad would be the perfect device to accompany my Nikon D40 and Flip HD video camera. I picked up an iPad Camera Connection kit which includes both an SD adapter and USB adapter for uploading photos and video.

I have the 32GB WiFi iPad, and seeing as how Kaiser Permanente provides free WiFi in their hospitals, I didn’t foresee any problems.

Camera Connection Kit

I love being able to take the SD card from my Nikon, plug it into the adapter, and connect it with the iPad. It’s so much easier than having to deal with a 6’ cable and wasting camera battery power, and the import process is both fast and intuitive. And as soon as the photos are imported, you’ve got a brilliant slideshow display in the Photos app.

Plus, there are some extra uses for the kit as reported on by Macworld.

Photos app

In the hospital after my sons were born, I uploaded both photos and video to the iPad. This is when things started to go wrong. First, the videos get uploaded into the Photos app, not the Videos app. And in the Photos app, the videos can’t be played. So I have 8 videos I can’t show anyone unless I want to pull out the Flip and let them watch on its tiny display.

Ignoring videos for the time being, I tried to publish my photos so I could start sharing them with the world. But as much as I hunted around the Photos app and Settings, I coudn’t figure out how to publish a MobileMe gallery. See, I subscribe to MobileMe — Apple’s online service that lets you sync a lot of your info, publish galleries, store files, etc — and I assumed that it would work perfectly on the iPad. I mean, we’re talking about the Apple experience. And what good is a camera connection kit if you can’t do anything with your photos once they’re on your iPad?

As it turns out, you can’t do anything with your photos once they’re on your iPad. You certainly can’t publish galleries with MobileMe. You can’t even email more than a few photos at a time. I was at a very perplexing dead-end.

iPhoto

I did bring my MacBook Pro to the hospital, just for backup, so I connected my iPad and tried to sync the photos over to iPhoto. The iPad didn’t appear in iPhoto though. I did some Google searches (not the easiest to find good results since there are too many popular words in this area) and finally concluded I needed to install some software updates and restart. After that, the iPad finally showed up in iPhoto along with the much-sought-after “Import All” button. But attempting to import the photos resulted in an “Unknown file type” error. As I didn’t have my camera-to-USB cable with me, I found myself at another dead-end.

Dropbox

The only other solution I could think of, though not ideal, was to upload my photos to my Dropbox (www.dropbox.com — an otherwise fantastic service that you really need to sign up for if you haven’t already) via the iPad Dropbox app. This isn’t an ideal solution, because I would have to send out links to individual photos rather than one link to a gallery. But it would be a start.

This was the first time I’d used the Dropbox app since getting my iPad and I encountered some frustrating design issues that makes it clear to me they need to either change how this universal app (meaning it works on iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad) works, or create an iPad-only version. One dealbreaker for me in this situation is its inability to create folders (or maybe it’s possible and just hidden extremely well). Another is that every photo I uploaded was given a label starting with “Mobile Photo”. Excuse me, Dropbox, these are photos from my Nikon D40. It’s not a chintzy photo I snapped with my iPhone. I don’t want my photos labeled like that, since that’s a pretty significant part of the URL I’ll have to send to everyone I want to view the photo.

So why not simply rename the photos? The Dropbox app doesn’t let you.

Wit’s End

With that final frustration, I concluded I would have to wait until I was back home with all my equipment at hand in order to publish a gallery of my newborn triplets to share with friends and family. (A side note: I just accomplished this today by connecting my camera via cable to my MBP and then using iPhoto’s MobileMe sharing feature — fortunately I had wisely chosen not to delete the photos from my D40 after the iPad import).

Don’t get me wrong, the iPad is an incredible device. But its role in managing and sharing your photos will have to remain as a bit player until Apple upgrades its software. This despite the fact that Apple has given us such a great way to take photos directly from the camera to the iPad.

Hopefully Apple rolls its way into this area very soon.