Using new iPad instead of MacBook on the road

Hi all,

I like to upload images from my Sony a7R III to a MacBook Pro when traveling. There, I tag them, and from there, I back them up on an SSD. Rarely, I do some preliminary editing to find out what's in an image. I wonder whether for this limited usage I could spare myself schlepping a MacBook around and confine myself to a current iPad Air with USB-C? Which is to say, is it possible to upload raw images at full resolution from the camera to the iPad via a USB-C cable, look at them and tag them in Adobe Lightroom, and back them up incl. the tags, again at full resolution, directly via USB-C on an SSD without its own power supply? Does anybody have experience with this?

Thanks and cheers
Heiko

Yes, it is possible. I use iPhone 14 Pro Max + iPad Pro for travel. Works great .

Raw images sync quite well between iPad and desktop. If you're syncing back to Classic there will be some housekeeping to do to replace the raws in the cloud with smart previews to prevent running out of cloud space (the standard photography plan only has 20GB, which is usually enough for me when 'm travelling).

However, I note tagging is a part of your workflow plan. AFAIK syncing keywords between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom on iOS and vice versa is NOT supported.

Please, anyone, correct me if I'm wrong on this

Actually, it's a bit more complicated'n that: Keywords are sync'ed once from LrC to Lr, but never back, and also never again - both keyword models are a bit incompatible, and that's the best Adobe came up with. So, for my workflow it won't work unfortunately.

Maybe I am missing something but after spending the last two weeks trying to find a photo workflow that uses an iPad in the field to some culling and metadata management (ideally from an external SSD) I have come to the conclusion this is more for hobby use rather than professional photography.

Ideally I'd like to have a solution where I off loads cards to my folder structure on the SSD, do some culling and meta tagging. Maybe work on one or two photos but that's it. When I get home I simply want to work off the SSD I had in the field and archive/ backup everything to cold storage.

Any solution that requires importing to the iPad, then syncing to the cloud before syncing back to a desktop computer at home is fine for a hand full of photos but utterly useless when you shoot hundreds or several thousand RAW images. Any cloud syncing simply takes too long and once you export the images back to an external drive all your folder management is gone.

Maybe I am missing something. Ideally I'd love to have something like PhotoMechanic on the iPad allowing me to work directly off an SSD rather than having to import everything to the iPad first.

mindfactory said:

Maybe I am missing something but after spending the last two weeks trying to find a photo workflow that uses an iPad in the field to some culling and metadata management (ideally from an external SSD) I have come to the conclusion this is more for hobby use rather than professional photography.
Ideally I'd like to have a solution where I off loads cards to my folder structure on the SSD, do some culling and meta tagging. Maybe work on one or two photos but that's it. When I get home I simply want to work off the SSD I had in the field and archive/ backup everything to cold storage.

Any solution that requires importing to the iPad, then syncing to the cloud before syncing back to a desktop computer at home is fine for a hand full of photos but utterly useless when you shoot hundreds or several thousand RAW images. Any cloud syncing simply takes too long and once you export the images back to an external drive all your folder management is gone.

Maybe I am missing something. Ideally I'd love to have something like PhotoMechanic on the iPad allowing me to work directly off an SSD rather than having to import everything to the iPad first.

Click to expand...

Well, maybe I'm (also) missing something, but I totally agree with you. This sync'ing back and forth is just too complicated to be worth it. But for me, the deal breaker is that LrC has a hierarchical keyword model and Lr (mobile) hasn't - but I want it badly. Don't understand why Adobe decided so but they did, and that's it for me.

To be honest I didn't even get that far. I ran a few tests loading 50 sample shots (RAW + JPG pairs). The syncing is simply too slow for a large number of images to be any useful. Never mind the fact that Lightroom Mobile doesn't seem to treat RAW and JPG images as pairs.

I have had a brief look at Capture One for iPad. It looks I might be able to at least do the culling and metadata tagging with it. It does require you to import all images first before you can work with them and then you have to export them out to the SSD again. It's a pain but better than nothing I guess. Only concern is that some people have reported issues with Capture One not releasing storage space on the iPad even after images have been deleted from the catalog. I need to do some more testing to confirm this.

Otherwise I am back to square one and will be dragging along my MacBook Pro.

I think I have a good iPad workflow for ipad and raw + jpg using an app I created. Works for raw workflow as well. Not in the store yet but I’d love your opinion on it. The link below has info and video about it.


I cull jpgs in the app. It removes raws that match jpgs culled. I backup to SSD from files app after culling and naming files. I use affinity photo to edit images on ipad. Currently the app doesn’t allow meta data editing but does show Exif data.


...Gary
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wandering.camera.guy/
Website: https://wanderingcameraguy.wixsite.com/photo

Thanks for sharing. There some interesting features. Overall I think this would work well for culling a relatively small number of images. Having a film strip would be beneficial as would be a simple start rating system.

I do feel this wouldn't be particularly fast for large number of images. Have a look at PhotoMechanic for Mac. I still find this to be the gold standard when it comes to culling and tagging very large number of images.

I have played around a little bit with Capture One for iPad yesterday and it does allow for fast culling using just the touch interface. Workflow is as simple as:

- import those files from card to Capture One

- cull images

- export remaining images as originals to SSD

I probably would copy from card to SSD first and then import to Capture One for added backup.

This would be near good enough if it allowed you to treat JPEG and RAW files as pairs. There is also zero support for metadata and if do any adjustments in the app they will be lost using this workflow as there is no XMP file support.

It feels as if developers are more interested in tying you into their cloud ecosystem rather than providing an efficient solution for photographers that produce large volumes of images. It's really frustrating.

I am still hoping that Camerabits will port Photo Mechanic to the iPad OS. At this stage I would be happy to with a simple one to one copy of the app without any touch specific UI rework.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to give feedback. I’ll take some time to digest it.

I’ve mostly been shooting macro and birds so I was attracted to side by side to get sharpest images but a couple hundred images does take an hour or so.

Again thanks and I too am searching for the best iPad workflow as it is capable of so much. Especially on the road.


...Gary
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wandering.camera.guy/
Website: https://wanderingcameraguy.wixsite.com/photo

Just came back from 2 weeks in Mauritius. Left my MacBook Pro at home due to weight constraints and only took the iPad Pro. I shot 680GB of videos, photos and panoramas. Here my impressions:

- Offloading images and video from cards to external SSDs via the iPad Files app using my usual folder based archiving structure worked well but was slow.

- Both the SSD and CFExpress Type B cards rapidly drained the iPad's battery.

- You can't copy multiple cards at ones or select more than a hundred files without the iPad Pro (M1) noticeably slowing down. On one occasions it was unresponsive for a few minutes.

- Doing a pre-selection of photos was painful and in the end I gave up. I tried both Lightroom and Capture One and neither worked particularly well for this amount images.

- Doing a pre-selection of videos was even worse. This could be easily fixed if the files app had a simple way of tagging videos. At the moment it requires two steps to tag a video.

- Any work I had done in the field was mostly wasted time because it didn't integrate well with the workflow I use on the Mac. It's all great if you stay cloud only but I would say that only works for small shoots. There isn't enough storage and upload times are at a snails pace. Plus keywording in the iPad apps (Lightroom and Capture One) is not at professional levels.

- The biggest plus was that I spend less time on the laptop and more time shooting and zero time doing other office admin work.

Looking at the battery drain and performance issues I understand why we don't have proper equivalents of PhotoMechanic or FinalCut Pro on the iPad.

My conclusion is what's really missing on the iPad is a simple but effective media management app that allows to:

- work with SSDs.

- handles RAW and JPG files as pairs

- has a way to easily browse and view videos

- has a way to easily attach keywords / tag images and videos (store as sidecars?)

- allows you to cull images / videos that are not needed

- not require me to import everything to the iPad first

- has grid view, comparison view and single view with thumbnail strip

@mindfactory: Very cool, thanks a million for this detailed evaluation. I have an M2 iPad Pro since a few weeks, but this won‘t make much of a difference. And in addition to your findings, part of which I anticipated on a theoretical level (but am still extremely thankful to have them confirmed in the real world), I have that obstacle of a non-hierarchical keyword sytem in Lr on the iPad, plus the inability to batch-keyword images.

Nail. Head. Hit.

As a strict hobbyist, I think LR offers the most complete mobile solution around. If I travel, I only shoot several GB, usually around 10GB, so syncing back to my laptop when I get home isn't a huge concern. But I can see that it's very restrictive when your photo count runs into the thousands and includes video.

IMHO, syncing to LrC is very much an add-on "bodge". It works, but it's not perfect or straightforward, and not ideal for professionals.

I feel there should be an option within LR on the iPad to use external storage and write sidecar files so you could copy your raws to a USB drive, cull and edit them in place and then simply plug the drive into your desktop when you get home and import into LrC with all edits, metadata intact.

I get that Adobe wants people to switch to the cloud system, but the infrastructure just isn't ready for a lot of professionals requirements.

The first version of iPadOS gave hope. Today, a few versions later, Apple's interest in file management seems to have expired. Apparently, the functions are enough for the majority of users. The handling of thousands of files with many gigabytes that we are used to from macOS is a big disappointment under iPadOS. Third-party apps have to use the basic routines of iPadOS and are limited accordingly.
I performed tests with a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 3 years ago. Backing up photos from the card reader to an external SSD ran more stable, provided more information, and was faster than my iPad Pro 11" from 2021.
In the meantime, I prefer to take a 13" MacBoo Air M1 with me, and mourn my 11" MBA.
Unfortunately, I can do not very much with an iPad Pro on photo tours.