MacMost Now 387: Viewing Photos On Your iPad

The Photos app is used to view pictures on your iPad that you sync from iPhoto or iTunes. Although the app is very limited, photos do look great on the iPad screen.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at the Photos App on the iPad. So, most of the Apps on the iPad have an equivalent on the Mac. For instance, Mail goes to Mail, calendar goes to iCal, iPod goes to iTunes. But Photos on your iPad is a little different. It's a very stripped-down photo viewer, not at all like iPhoto. Let's take a look. 
So, I wanna show you the Photos App on the iPad. And here you've got several different albums comes up. Let's start here with the photos. This is just one long list of all the photos that you've been able to sync from your computer and also that have been saved individually to the iPad. So, we can go to the Albums view to basically go and sort them by albums. These are the albums that I've set up in iPhoto with the exception of this one, which is the Saved Photos. These are photos that were somehow created in some way on the iPad. Now, the iPad doesn't have a camera. But what it does have is the ability to take screen shots like these. Some Apps will actually create various different graphics that you can draw, or from some other things. So any App that can create a photo or anyway that you can take a screen shot will be put into the Saved Photos album and this will sync it back to your computer when you sync your iPad. You could jump to one of these albums here and you can then jump to a photo. You could view it, you can scroll through the photos at the bottom like that. You can start a slide show. You can also, for this individual photo, e-mail it, assign it to a contact, use as wallpaper or copy it. And copying it, you can paste it, say, into pages or you can paste it into an e-mail. So I go back to the album here and one of the cool things you're probably seeing is the ability to do this and put it back in the album. And we can tap on another one to go to it. Now, we have also Events, Faces and Places. So Events, that's the way that iPhoto sorts things by default. Basically it's, you know, you take a bunch of pictures and then sync them to your Mac, you get an event created. Also Faces, which is something you create in iPhoto. And Places, that's something that you might see on iPhoto. But this will work on your iPad even with pictures taken on Windows. If they're GPS, your iPad will put them together so you could jump to, say, a pin and actually view what's in there as an album just based on it being in the same place. Now when you're looking at any grouping of photos, you can press this button here instead of getting a choice right away of what to do with these. You can then select them. And, you can select 3 here, and in this case, I can e-mail all 3 or copy all 3 to the clipboard and then paste them in something else. Now if I do this with the saved photos, I can actually have one more option and that is to delete them. So looking at a photo here, we could zoom in on it and pan around, zoom back out. When we tap in the middle, we get these controls here again. We can also, of course slide it, the entire thing over to see each photo like that. And one of the things you can do here is you can make this your wallpaper. Now, there's actually two different types of wallpapers on the iPad. The first is the Lock Screen and that's what you see at the beginning and it says 'Slide to unlock' . And then there's also the Home Screen, and that's actually what's behind all the icons that you can see. So you can tap one or the other or both to a particular image. E-mailing a photo is also very easy. Tap there and it'll create a new e-mail message without ever leaving the Photos App. You type To and the Subject and you can type a message and you can see it's pasted in there. Now my test shows that it's not the real image that you're e-mailing. This is a pretty large 5 mega-pixel image here, possibly even more. But, e-mailed, it comes out to be about 2 or 3 mega-pixels which is still pretty good, ... the conversion happens when it's coming to your iPad because you really don't need a super-high resolution version for this screen or any VGA output you have from it, or whether the conversion's happening when you're sending the e-mail. But if you're looking for a way to gift somebody a photo and you want them to have the best quality copy of it, this probably isn't the way to do it.
 
So, first the good: The photos look fantastic on the iPad. Screen's wonderful. And you can flip through photos really nicely. It's just a pleasure to look at photos on the iPad. But the bad is that Photos could be so much more than just a photo viewer. I mean it'd at least give us the ability to maybe tag photos, do different things, do just some simple editing and adjustments, things that might sync back to iPhoto or just allow you to send a modified version of the image via e-mail or post it somewhere, say to Facebook or even MobileMe. One thing I don't show is the Picture Frame functionality of your iPad. It's not part of the Photos App. It's just something you set up in Settings and it will create a slide show that shows on the Lock screen so you can use your iPad as a digital picture frame when you're not using it for something else. This does leave a lot of room for third-party developers, like I'd love to see an App where you can pick a bunch of photos and narrate them and send them to somebody as a video. We're also still waiting for the camera kit for the iPad. This will include two different things that connect to your dock: one is something that allows you to connect an SD card so that you can load photos directly from your camera into your iPad, and the other is something that'll connect directly to your camera via a USB. It'd be interesting to see if these add features to Photos or maybe there's some sort of new App that uses them. It'd be great to see if we can actually use digital camera and take a picture and have it appear directly on the iPad. 
Hope you liked this quick look at the Photos App on the iPad. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 387: Viewing Photos On Your iPad”

Mario

14 years ago

Hi Gary,

I always love your video explanations on everything Apple. Keep up the good work !

Greetings,

Mario (Belgium).

Marianna

hey gary! You seem to know alot about the ipad, I want to put all of our merchandise on an ipad as a catalog. Basically just the high quality photos, and i need to have the style#,price,and carat weight with each photo so if a customer likes it i can instantly quote them all the info for that item. How do i do that?

Gary Rosenzweig

Make a PDF version of the catalog and load it into iBooks or any other PDF viewer.

Karen Kofoet

What about using the ipad as a photo viewer to sell pictures.
I shoot action photos. So the my runner would come get my memory card & bring it back to the sales table. He would need to show the pictures so the parents can pick one & ask for it to be printed. I pads seem so much lighter then computers to use.

andy

Hello,
There is an iPad app named sortshot which can be helpful to you as it is Quicker an easy way of image retrieval through unique photo and video tagging. Tagging options include personalized keywords, ratings, favourites, or type of media – photo or video. Tapping on a tag provides instant results so that we can further refine our search with additional tags and keywords.

Ronan

Hi.i am a photography passionate.I have collection of around 5k pics.so you can imagine how difficult it was to search a pic.now i am using Sort Shots app for organizing my pics & after using this app i would say its the best app for organizing & sharing pics.. simply awesome..

Richard24

13 years ago

Okay, Gary well explained. Now how do we delte a photo from the iPad 2?

If it is in the Camera Roll, then view the photo and tap the trash can icon. If it in a synced photo album, then simply change your sync options in iTunes to not include that photo the next time you sync. For instance, only sync albums you want to have on your iPad. If you don't want a photo on your iPad, then don't include that photo in an album that you have set to sync.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 387: Viewing Photos On Your iPad

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 387: Viewing Photos On Your iPad”

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