Earlier today Christopher Phin pointed out the interesting-looking Photosmith, “the iPad to Lightroom bridge.” I haven’t tried the app, but it sounds promising for lightweight, on-the-go triage & sync (y’know, the thing that photographers have been clamoring for):
It’s not a replacement for Lightroom–it’s a travel-sized companion.
The Lightroom integration will work simply as a plugin… By using a File > menu option, you can open the [Photosmith] Sync screen directly from within Lightroom.
No additional software is needed. No tinkering with settings is needed. No iTunes or special configuration. It works on a PC or a Mac… The iPad is detected automatically as long as you’re connected to the same WiFi network and [Photosmith] is running on it – as soon as the Sync screen opens, it automatically looks for your iPad and then shows you the stats (last sync date, number of new images/collections/keywords), and then lets you choose the collection you want to sync (or all of them).
Sounds interesting. But It’s tough not to ask why this wasn’t something Adobe created.
[Indeed, but the time is not yet right to answer. –J.]
Now this I’m really looking forward to!
Had absolutely no idea this was being worked on, so thanks John for the ‘heads up’.
Geez, at this rate my MacBook Pro isn’t going to see the light of day 🙂
Cheers,
Glyn
Wonderful! With Adobe’s history of embracing and encouraging plugins I hope this is the first of many focused, feature-slim companion apps for Adobe’s software. Kudos to the Photosmith team.
Third-party apps may actually be a better fit for users than Adobe brand companion apps, now I consider it – meaning no offense to Adobe’s mobile development efforts. Third parties are lean and hungry and unafraid of catering to one category off user or one subset of activities, and ignore, potentially, the majority of user desires.
If photosmith encourages the development of a slew of lightweight companion apps Adobe won’t need to wrestle with the complex question of supporting subsets of their applications on mobile and tablets. Third-party devs and users can work things out for themselves.
Another similar solution, although it might not be as direct and simple as Photosmith, is a Publish Service to a Dropbox folder to an iPad app like Portfolio. Portfolio connects directly to Dropbox and does a very nice job of displaying photographs on an iPad, and is a great way to present a portfolio.
Phil, here is a message from the developer after asking a similar question about Dropbox…
“You can upload directly to Dropbox (or Facebook or Flickr) from the app. Select any number of photos (or the entire set) and upload them. The app will give you the option to set the size (small, medium, large, and even RAW if uploading to Dropbox), and then upload to the directory/set/album of your choice. Even your metadata is maintained on Facebook and Flickr (there’s no tagging in Dropbox…). And it keeps track of any changes, so if you upload multiple times, only your changes will be sent.”
Pretty neat stuff!! This would also give you the ability to use that Portfolio app together with Photosmith as a great pair 🙂
Pretty cool app, seems to work and allows great sync between iPad and Lightroom. Saw a pretty comprehensive review on http://www.knowphoto.com