Going iPad-only: what's the best way to manage your photos?

lorrelorre
Posted:
in iPad edited January 2014
Hey guys,



My younger brother is soon moving out of the elderly house, and he will take the iMac with him. Since my mother loves the 16GB iPad2 I bought her half a year ago so much, she's considering going for a PC-free digital life, and using the iPad for everything.



I kinda see how all of this could work, except for one thing: What would be the best, most streamlined way to store and manage her holiday snapshots? She currently has everything stored in iPhoto (an older version running under snow leopard) but adding all those pictures to a 16GB iPad would fill up all the internal storage.



So I'm wondering, what's the best solution for this problem? Can iCloud help here, or are there other cloud-based picture services that we should use to transfer her photo library.



Any future additions to her library would have to be made through the camera adapter kit of course.



Thanks in advance for the help.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    You'd probably be best having some local storage. Pictures that comes straight off a camera are a few MB so uploading to a site like flickr can take a while and some photos might be private that you don't want on a server.



    You get apps for connecting to a NAS drive such as:



    http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fileb...364738545?mt=8



    NAS drives are hard drives that have ethernet connections and you just plug them into a router. Then your iPad should be able to send files back and forth - make sure the app has transfers both ways, not just browsing from the drive. Seagate has a direct wifi GoFlex Satellite but doesn't support writes so no copying from the iPad to the drive.



    Apple is missing a trick here with the Time Machine drives. They could sell one with dual 500GB-1TB 2.5" drives synced for security (not RAID 1, just clones out of sync by a small amount of time). Then you can copy to and from the iPad directly at 802.11n speeds.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    I would definitely consider iCloud Photo Stream as part of the strategy, as well as Drop Box for total offline content storage.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    lorrelorre Posts: 396member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman View Post


    I would definitely consider iCloud Photo Stream as part of the strategy, as well as Drop Box for total offline content storage.



    Thanks for the suggestions, DropBox is definitely a must anyhow. I was thinking about the photostream, but it looks pretty lame to me. Looks like it's just a huge list of all your most recently uploaded photos. Or am I wrong?



    Apple should've just made something that syncs your iPhoto Events to iCloud and then makes that content seamlessly accesible on demand from the iPad, with the option to create new events from the iPad without having to have every single picture locally stored. Kind of like what iTunes cloud sync does.



    I just realized: can't she just put all her "old" pictures on Picasa or Flickr, or another web-based picture service in private albums? Or is it too difficult to get pictures from a digital camera onto the iPad and then onto Flickr?



    And a NAS is a really cool idea but it sounds like overkill for my mom. She doesn't have a big offline music collection, nor does she download films. A few gigabytes for pictures is enough. And indeed, I agree that using a Time Machine to expand your iPad storage is another big missed opportunity from Apple.
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