Using new iPad instead of MacBook on the road

[Arcimboldo]

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

 

[graybalanced]

is it possible to upload raw images at full resolution from the camera to the iPad via a USB-C cable

Yes, this is easy with the USB-C iPads. (More challenging with the Lightning iPads due to bus power restrictions.)

look at them and tag them in Adobe Lightroom

Sure, Lightroom iPad can import them directly from a camera or card reader that is connected to the iPad by USB. You can tag them, but it is slower because it lacks the tag shortcuts in Lightroom Classic.

Also, tags entered in Lightroom mobile do not sync back to Lightroom Classic. They do sync with Lightroom cloud for Mac/PC, but Adobe says there is a technical obstacle to syncing tags with the older Classic code. So if I did not bring my laptop, I wait to tag until I get home.

and back them up incl. the tags, again at full resolution, directly via USB-C on an SSD without its own power supply?

This is where all the problems are. Once you import into Lightroom iPad, the images are in Lightroom private storage, then uploaded to Lightroom cloud with their edits and tags as soon as the app can get them off the machine. They are not out in the normal iOS file system, cannot be backed up locally, cannot be seen by other apps unless sent from Lightroom.

The only way to locally back up images already imported into iPad Lightroom app is to export copies of them first. If you export original, you get the raw file. If you export DNG, you do get edits and maybe tags, but the raw must be converted to DNG to store the info. The Lightroom app does not create XMP sidecars.

If you copy the images from camera to iPad into a folder in using the Files app, they are out in the file system, so you can then copy those out to a backup SSD by drag and drop or copy and paste. But then they will not be in Lightroom. If you copy an image to an iPad folder (Files app) and import that in Lightroom, now two copies will occupy double the space on the iPad because it is copied into Lightroom, not moved or linked. Lightroom iPad is like Lightroom Mac/PC for the cloud: It does not use local file links.

The problems with this is why I still have to bring my laptop, since I am Lightroom Classic based and cannot always count on Internet upload speed on trips. IPad Lightroom does not work like Classic and Adobe has no intention of making it work like Classic. If I want to edit a few and all I brought was my iPad, sometimes I will use the RawPower app instead.

 

[Arcimboldo]

@graybalanced, thanks a million for your excellent, detailed answer. This is really all I need to know to see that, like you, I most of the time will have to still bring my laptop if I want to conveniently keyword and backup my images abroad. Actually, the missing sync'ing of keywords, the missing keyword hierarchies, and the missing keyword batching break the neck of my idea to confine myself to an iPad. In the meantime I found a 4 year-old discussion on an Adobe community forum where people already complain about the same thing, and nothing has changed since then... so be it.

To find out whether the grass is greener on the other side, I looked at Capture One and Capture One iPad, but the latter does not even have a keywording function, let alone sync keywords to the desktop version.