I got to play with my friend Nigel’s iPad last night.
Whilst I was impressed by the iPad in general, it was the iPhotos app that blew me away. The pinch an album, inspect, open fully, pinch closed, move on paradigm was brilliantly developed. As you played with it you could see this was how digital photos were meant to be shown almost, and along with how Sky+ changed how I watch TV and the iPod changed how I listened to music this would change how I interact with my photos.
I’ve now figured out what the killer iPad app is for me. I have 30k pictures sitting on my hard drive waiting to be sorted. And they get bigger and bigger every trip, because filtering 1000 ski pictures down to an album of the 30 good ones takes time. I keep planning to get Aperture and sit down to develop a work flow to sort out my photo archive. It’s time consuming though so the archive builds and my photos languish in darkness.
What I wan’t is an Aperture Lite for the iPad.
How I see this working would be as more or less like this * It syncs with a copy of Aperture on my main machine * Aperture then copies a reduced size but highish quality size to the iPad * I then sort, rate, tag and categorise the photo’s into albums * I then sync back with Apeture and all my categorisations are available on the full size pics
Then I can export to iPhoto/Flickr/Smugmug/Facebook etc and actually let people see the photos.
The iPad may almost be the perfect device for this, for me. If a copy of all my pics are sitting on the iPad, I can filter them on my sofa, in bed, in the coffee shop or on the train. I would actually get through the my photos rather than just buying bigger hard drives to store them on. Playing with iPhoto on it showed what a good interface and interaction you can build on the iPad and I can see how this could be done pretty well. Or if Apple does it, incredibly well. When they sweat the small stuff, Apple makes great shit.
That’s it. That’s my killer app.
I’m sure some people would have other killer apps and others would have none. But for me, this would make the iPad a must have.
Although I’ll probably get one anyway. [For probably read absolutely]
1. Simon
I’ll have to check but aperture can share stuff with iphoto so you may be able to do that already
2. Matt
Or, just a version of iPhoto for the iPad, with basic editing/flagging/sorting built-in, and syncing with iPhoto on the Mac. That would rock.
And it’s probably the more likely release, in fairness, as the number of users with iPhoto on their Mac vastly outweighs the number with Aperture. Or how about “iLife for iPad”, similar to iWork for iPad, in that it would have cut-down versions of iPhoto, iMovie and… err… Garageband?
I’m still totally holding out for version 2, which will almost definitely be released in a year. My next purchase from the big will probably be the iPhone HD/4G/whatever in June-ish, especially if it’s got all the specs that Gruber thinks it will.
3. Adrian
I don’t see why having a lot of people who want to use iPhoto precludes an Aperture app. They have iWorks apps and those are far fewer users than iLife.
I’d likely pay up to $50 for an Aperture iPhone app.
4. Jesper
I’m yet to actually play with an iPad but from watching the TV ads I’d say iPhoto would also be the killer app for me. I have sorted out and arranged my photos in iPhoto on my Mac already but viewing them on an iPad instead of a MacBook would be more like the experience I’m after when looking at photos.
My workflow is like this btw: All RAW photos are saved on my Drobo in one folder per date. The keepers are converted from RAW to jpg and copied to iPhoto. I make each day an event in iPhoto because that’s the mental model I have of my photos.
So iPhoto is my photo album. Noy my photo storage.
I never tag anything (not even sure if iPhoto does tagging but I wouldn’t use it even if it did)
5. Adrian
I agree, iPhoto would be my album too not my storage.
But I would like to tag events “birthday”, “ski trip” etc and faces and locations (as this is how I used to do it).
I need something that allows me to do that work flow and end up with well tagged data in iPhoto.
But it needs an iPhoto iPad to allow input not just display or something like Aperture for the iPad. Not sure if apple will do either of these though.