The Trouble With Using the iPad Pro for Editing Photos

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I’ve been a big iPad advocate for a long time. My iPad was the device that got me into the Apple world after using a HP tablet. At first I was really keen on just reading tablets and the iPad but I soon found it useful for more and more of my work. I even […] The post The Trouble With Using the iPad Pro for Editing Photos appeared first on Chris J Wilson.

I’ve been a big iPad advocate for a long time. My iPad was the device that got me into the Apple world after using a HP tablet. At first I was really keen on just reading tablets and the iPad but I soon found it useful for more and more of my work. I even enjoyed using the iPad for editing photos with apps like snapseed which made me feel more connected to my images as I poked and prodded them with my finger. However, there were limitations that meant editing on a Mac was essential. These included things like not being able to edit RAW files as well as limited apps functionality to edit images. Overtime, some of these limitations have gone but there are still real issues editing photos (professionally or semi professionally) on the iPad Pro.

What’s great

Let’s start with the highlights of the iPad for editing photos now. Many of the technical limitations have disappeared now. The iPad Pro is a powerful machine and can handle RAW files. Sure it’s no iMac Pro (or even iMac) but it is powerful enough to edit photos. There are some very simple and more powerful editing tools that have some great features. These include

VSCO (which can bulk edit images and copy and paste settings)
Snapseed
The new Lightroom Mobile
Pixelmator (with the promise of Pixelmator Pro)
RAW Power
Affinity Photo (the real photoshop replacement on iOS)

The new USB 3 lightning SD card reader really speeds up downloading photos, and of course, it’s so portable and can make great use of the Apple pencil for fine detail editing with minimal lag.

But…

Unfortunately, there are some huge issues that come up with trying to do pro editing on the iPad. These can be broken into editing and managing photos. The editing issues are smaller, but still present, the managing photos issue is the real problem.

Editing Trouble with the iPad Pro

The main editing issues with the iPad Pro come in mass editing. While Affinity is a full blow photoshop replacement, doing bulk edits on a series of images is difficult. There are options like VSCO which can paste settings on a series of images, but this is located in the VSCO app, once you finish these edits and want to do some work on layers or something, you need to export a JPEG (producing a copy of the image which isn’t clearly marked) and then edit that image.

Mangaging photos

This is where things really get tough on the iPad. All photos have to go through the photos application (okay, there are some ways around this, but not every app supports these workarounds of using cloud storage systems). The photos app is fine for your photo collection from your phone, but for anything more complicate soon is lacking. It’s things like the inability to see the file format, or the size of the image. It’s the fact that you often have to make duplicates of images rather than send them directly between apps. And it’s also the trouble with using up limited expensive cloud storage space for each version of the image.

Oh and you can’t set the file name or meta data in the iOS version. This is one of the factors that constantly infuriates me. If you want your photo to have good SEO value, then you need to use a workaround to make sure your image has a suitable name.

The album system is also difficult to manage without the ability to reorder or arrange by date created and so on. In general, you have to duplicate files, it’s hard to find the file you want and don’t even think about the issues with getting prints made.

Suggestions for Apple

I doubt apple will listen to just me, but if they happen to read this and want a few simple changes that would vastly improve the iPad editing experience, here are my suggestions.

1. Allow apps to download photos directly

If you want to add photos to VSCO, you have to add them to photos app, then VSCO, same with Lightroom CC. You can’t directly load from an SD card. This should be changed so you can load photos to Lightroom, make your edits, then save A copy back to photos.

2. Allow editing of Meta Data in Photos on iOS

Let us add information like Location, keywords and the file name on iOS. You can do this on the Mac but not iOS so the ability is there, just not in the app yet. This would also open up some options for finding images more easily (via searching for different tags) and improve exporting options.

3. Support external storage

This is probably completely against Apple’s best interest and so the most unlikely to happen. With a laptop I can attach an external hard drive and download my images there to edit them, taking up no space on my precious, limited internal hard drive. On the iPad It takes up my very limited (and more expensive) internal storage space AND cloud storage. Adding external storage space would help professionals so much who want to keep their personal, private photos separate from work based photos.