The iPad Tour: Uploading Photos at 196mph!
One of my goals for this trip was to shoot photos with my digital camera, and store, edit and upload photos using my only computer, the iPad. (Here’s a photo of Seamus and family just uploaded to flickr)
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| bospdaug UK |
I’ve also brought along two 16GB sd cards, and two 8GB cards for the camera. As you know, I have acquired local 3G cards in the UK, and France— however, I have uploaded to flickr mostly using local wifi, but sometimes with 3G, mainly in the UK where 3G is a lot cheaper! Truth be told, the iPad is a few bug fixes,and feature implementations away from being a true photagrapher’s tool for use with raw photos.
First, I have discovered there is a very nasty bug in the iPad photo app— it will regularly crash while downloading photos with the connection kit (and sometimes kernel panic with auto reboot)
This crash happens anywhere from 1-3 images into the download from the sd card to the iPad… and you’re then forced to have the photo app rescan your card again, which can take many minutes… But then occasionally it just magically works, and all is well. The trick is to just be patient, and keep retrying until all the photos are transferred.
About a third of the way through the trip, I used a friend’s MacBook to pull all the raw files off the iPad, and upload them to a server in the US using conventional transfer, but as of now, my 64GB iPad (mostly emptied of videos beforehand) is full.
While the iPad will store and transfer the raw files via iPhoto, or Lightroom, Apple does not provide an API to access the raw images on the device— so any photo app can only access the added jpg, or the crappy jpg in the .dng file, if you don’t configure for raw+jpg.
Photogene has been quite reasonable in tweaking images a bit (For example bring up the levels in the blacks in contrasty images, or crop a bit) but I find quite a bit of distortion added if the tools are applied more than just a little.
I think a iPad version of Apeture that supported raw mode, some image resizing, etc., would be the ultimate solution.
In the meantime, with a little patience, the iPad is quite useful, and viewing photos on the iPad screen while traveling is very nice indeed.
The iPad Tour: In France, It’s nice (necessary) To have friends
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“Welcome to the most expensive service in the world!” my UK friend Andre (who helped me get my O2 service last week) had trumpeted to me in a text message as I arrived at my first hotel stop in Nice, France, late Monday night (gleefully happy to tweak the French— apparently the hundred years’ war not yet quite over!)
There was more than a grain of truth to all of this— as I found out, getting local service of any kind was not so easy in France.
My plan was to continue in France what had worked in the UK— get a local sim card, this time from Orange, and instead of paying $100 for 100 megabytes from AT&T, get a decent USA sized chunk of service for many less euros, and fill in the gaps with my $7.95/mo Boingo wifi service.
What I quickly found out was that Boingo didn’t seem to work anywhere in France (their maps claimed otherwise) and Orange had a strange policy where 3G data could be used for anything other than e-mail!
… And one other small detail… to get a micro-sim of any kind in France, one must have a French bank account! (Why, said Andre, “because they’re French!”)
A good friend, from my contracting days for Digital Equipment (parts of which now known as HP), no longer a software developer, but a beekeeper, lives locally here in France, and offered to use his local credentials to get me online.
A little research, and we ditched Orange for SFR, which offers a 1GB ‘unlimited’ account for 29€. A short wait in line at SFR, some contracts signed, a sim password, and a cash transfer later, I’m now data enabled until my return to the USA in about a week and a half.
Setup was simpler— instead of applying through the app, it was done in store, with a sim pin. There is a no-term contract, which my friend has to cancel after I leave.
At dinner tonight, a woman at the next table (UK based photographer) upon seeing my iPad got up and walked over to my table, and asked if she could look at her website— which had just been converted to support the iPad.
“You must be mad for this iPad… Is the network always this slow?”
Mad perhaps, but frankly, I was glad to have any network at all.
