We’ve come a long way, baby:
- 2004: Epson P-2000: $500, 1360 grams., 3.8” screen, and 40GB HD.
- 2014: Apple iPhone 6 Plus: $500*, 172 grams, 5.5” screen, and 128GB HD.
So wouldn’t this be a brilliant tool for importing, triaging, and editing one’s images on the go? Sadly, as John Gruber & Rene Ritchie noted & others confirm, you evidently can’t plug Apple’s Camera Connection Kit into the iPhone. What a drag. Let’s see whether this changes.
Side note: I remain in sad amazement that 4.5 years after the iPad made tablets mainstream, no one—not Apple, not Adobe, not Google—has, to the best of my knowledge, implemented a way to let photographers to do what they beat me over the head for years requesting:
- Let me leave my computer at home & carry just my tablet** & camera
- Let me import my raw files (ideally converted to vastly smaller DNGs), swipe through them to mark good/bad/meh, and non-destructively edit them, singly or in batches, with full raw quality.
- When I get home, automatically sync all images + edits to/via the cloud and let me keep editing there or on my Mac/PC.
This remains a bizarre failure of our industry.
*Subsidized, but it’s a super fast little computer supporting myriad editing apps & high-speed connectivity, for God’s sake!
** Or now Big-Ass Phone
Doesn’t GoPro + Lightroom Mobile enables you to just that?
Download the photos over Wifi, edit them in Lightroom.
The only thing is missing is the raw file… (It is time for GoPro to adopt that as well)
John,
Really? This is the first I’m hearing of this… 😉
For your reader’s edification, here’s what I wrote on the topic earlier this year:
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/04/the-field-triage-opportunity-for-lr-mobile.html
Regards,
Tom Hogarty
Adobe Systems
I’m currently travelling with a big Canon, a small Sony and a Surface Pro 3 doing pretty much what you are looking for. I can sync to OneDrive any time I have an internet connection or to an external drive, micro SD or whatever.
I do RAW conversions and editing using Phase One Capture One and/or Photoshop CC and other Adobe products.
The keyboard is thin enough that there is no reason not to use it. Or not.
For the first time, I am not in the position of nervously waiting to get back to my desktop to see and edit my images.
Am I missing something here?
This is the $64,000 question…. why won’t Apple allow or Adobe/Lightroom make a work around to allow importing & manipulating of RAW images easy and effective. I even explored other platforms, but they didn’t seem much more Photography user friendly.
Last year I used the iPad on a trip to Europe to import my RAWs to function as a viewing tool and to “backup” the images. But the workflow was NOT very smooth, and very time intensive….. and still did not allow usage Lightroom yet (wasn’t out yet). I had to import them, then export them to a WIFI drive, then copy them to Camera Roll (to make a JPEG), then delete the RAWs (to free up limited iPad space… Didn’t have the 128 GB iPad).
I’ve been doing this with a Moto Xoom tablet for quite a while now, but you’re right–this has been tougher than it seems it needs to be.
I had to “root” my tablet (thankfully, a basic 1-click sort of affair on the Xoom), and then install a USB storage device app (required root), which allowed me to connect a USB stick with a card reader on it right to my device. From there, there’s android apps capable of tagging and even editing Nikon and Cannon raw. Trick for me was getting the card into the device!
Maybe when we all have gigabit wifi, this’ll all look a bit like glass using transistor tubes ;D