I recently had a brief twitter conversation with Scott Williams (swilliams) which he was kind of enough to follow up with a blog post on the topic of photography and the iPad. I think there are a number of problems with the current ecosystem of tools and apps, and no good solution to photography on the iPad. I think there are a use cases which Apple could target, or more realistically third parties could address, with future hardware, online services, and/or changes to the OS in iOS 8. I also think that the possibility of a larger format iPad (12-13”) might form part of Apple’s motivation for making some of these changes. Apple likes to introduce new hardware with new, impressive applications that show it off. A "pro" iPad might merit some "pro" apps.
First, I’ll address the immediate and most obvious problem, or distinction, in use cases. Some users have cameras; other users have iOS devices with cameras. The experience of getting a photo onto your iOS device is very different (obviously) depending on whether you use your iOS device to take the photograph, or whether you use an unconnected device. If you have an iPhone or iPad, your photographs will appear by default in PhotoStream. PhotoStream is confusing and has spurred a number of back-and-forth discussions in the tech press. But fundamentally PhotoStream is positioned by Apple as a “your pictures everywhere” temporary transport system for your images. PhotoStream is not backup. PhotoStream is not archival. PhotoStream is not storage. It is transport. PhotoStream gets your images onto your device.
For users who take their photos somewhere else, however, PhotoStream right now is not a good solution. This means everyone who downloads their images from point & shoot cameras, digital SLRs, or whatever device they own has to jump through hoops to get the photos on their iPad or iPhone. Yes, if you download the images from your camera onto your Mac, and then upload them to iPhoto, they will appear in PhotoStream. I don’t know anyone who does this regularly.
The problem is compounded for pro users or home users with “prosumer” desires. RAW format images, and RAW conversion, are not handled in a good way by PhotoStream. Ideally, PhotoStream would upload the RAW file, metadata tags for any adjustments or settings, and possibly then the converted JPEG image. However, PhotoStream will only store the RAW file if you haven’t made any adjustments. If you make adjustments, PhotoStream instead only stores the JPEG preview image, which is useless for any workflow centering around RAW images. Worse yet, if you have a camera and take a considerable amount of images, and only download them occasionally, it appears that PhotoStream will delete the oldest images – even if those images are newly uploaded. So if you upload a few hundred photos which are a month or two old, they might already be past the 1000 image limit and end up immediately pushed out of PhotoStream since there are newer pictures. This behaviour is documented on Apple’s support forums, but I haven’t reproduced it personally.
All this discussion ignores the fundamentally frustrating problem of actually downloading images from the camera to the computer. It’s a tedious, annoying process. But maybe it won’t go away. Theoretically this is a distinct job-to-be-done that is separate from the iOS photo app question. There are current wifi SD-card products, wifi-battery-grips for digital SLRs, and other solutions which attempt to address the question of uploading pictures, but these all require a nearby computer when the photograph is taken. An LTE cellular data connection on every camera body would address this problem, but only if manufacturers could agree together on some shared standard (Android?) for applications, or some shared platform (Dropbox?) for storing the images. This isn’t going to happen, and wouldn’t be cost effective or technology-effective in most cases (cellular technology changes faster than digital SLR or point & shoot camera technology, and you might easily end up with an obsolete and unsupported Android-based camera with great lenses and a usable sensor).
Scott Williams posits a “camera wireless connector” of some kind on his blog, which would upload each photo immediately, as taken, to the nearest iOS device (or the app, directly). I don’t see this as a working solution. First of all, the hypothetical photo app would fundamentally be an iPad app, and you might not have your iPad around with you when taking pictures. Second of all (as swilliams notes), pairing a camera with an iPad is hard on a hardware level and software level. Cameras mostly do not have wifi or Bluetooth, so you would need an adapter card. Then you’d have to create an ad-hoc network somehow, and join both devices. Finally, the app would have to be open, and accept data from the camera. Background app restrictions make this final piece annoying as things currently stand in iOS. I believe the computer is a frustrating, but still necessary piece of the puzzle.
If we focus on the computer then, as the portal through which images must flow to the app, a simple “camera gateway” photo uploader application seems like an obvious solution. This tool would function like Apple’s Image Capture, and simply upload images, whether RAW, JPEG, or other format, into a cloud platform. This cloud platform could be PhotoStream, or it could be a third party service. Currently, Image Capture does not support PhotoStream.
There’s another job-to-be-done, though, and that is the need for archive and storage of images. EverPix tried to provide a service like this, and there are other competitors, but ideally this service would store full resolution, RAW or JPEG images, without additional compression, permanently. This application and cloud platform would perform the image transport job and image archive job simultaneously. I’d like to see Apple do this, but I don’t have any confidence that Apple cares about this market. Storing this kind of data permanently also gets expensive very quickly, and the cost would almost certainly have to be passed along to users in the form of a recurring monthly or yearly subscription payment. Apple does not have much interest in this kind of model. Dropbox (or a similar file-storage service) could be used, even as it works today, for this, though it would quickly become pricey for the average user. Overall there is no good solution to get bulk images from external cameras into a cloud platform for long term storage and use on iOS.
This brings me then to the question of the app itself. Unfortunately the above digression was necessary because I will now pretend that such a cloud photo ingestion, storage, and archive platform exists. It doesn’t.
I imagine a solid iPad to handle several photo-related tasks. The jobs-to-be-done would mostly overlap with the current feature sets of program like Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture. This app wouldn't be a companion to either program, it would (ideally) be a replacement for a computer-based photo workflow. Again, we're assuming the problem of transport is solved somehow.
These are the basic jobs in my mind:
Sorting and grouping images
Choosing good images (some call this "editing" or making "selects")
Making RAW adjustments and conversion
Simple photo editing like contrast, color, sharpness, curves
Exporting images or sharing them
There are other jobs which people might want the app to do. Tagging images and marking them with metadata is very important for some workflows. Facial identification matters to some people. Creating a website or gallery matters to people. Printing matters a lot to certain users. But I think the jobs above would be the basic requirements of the app.
The Photos app on iPad currently doesn't do these jobs. iPhoto on iPad doesn't do these jobs. There are number of photo-editing iPad apps, but no good all around tool to manage these things that I have ever run into. Admittedly, this is mostly because the first problem, the problem of transporting and storing images, holds apps back.
I said I would assume that we have the cloud platform solved, but let me go back briefly and talk about why current apps can't do these things. Without getting too technical, iOS holds them back. Apps can't delete or mess with the Camera Roll or PhotoStream. Apps can add photos, but can't replace them (iPhoto can edit, but it's a special case). Apps can't easily create a shared pool to move images between themselves. So each app is an island, and they can't solve the bigger picture workflow problems.
But let's say this cloud service works, and works really well. You could use it instead of the native Camera Roll or PhotoStream, and avoid the above issues. All you'd need to handle photos capture on iOS (from iPhones or iPads) would be an uploader/connector app on the phone or iPad. Dropbox and others already offer this functionality.
Many people don't manage their photos. But this doesn't mean they don't want to - it's just that the current tools are bad, confusing, and time consuming. Apple's started to recognize this, and the iOS 7 photos application is an improvement in that it lets you see thumbnails and zoom in/out of them chronologically. Events in iPhoto on the Mac were another attempt to deal with this problem of organization. Images need to be grouped into logical groups, whether you call them "events," "albums," "folders," or something else. Tagging might also solve this problem, if implemented correctly (and I think tagging is harder than folders to get right, and mostly more confusing for users).
Space matters for this. The iPhone is too small to do much sorting and dragging. I would argue even the iPad mini is effectively too small for this. I think a large format iPad could shine in this area. Retina displays and room to see many thumbnails or small images together lets people drag or quickly flick images around. I think Light Tables in Aperture don't make a lot of sense (and I've never understood what they're really meant for) but that kind of approach might work on a large iPad. Or there might be another way. But sorting and grouping matters, and I think it's one of the key things people need to do. Sometimes an "import session" might be a logical grouping, and maybe the portal application could handle some of this automatically based on import and other metadata, but I think there needs to be a manual process, and a good user interface.
Making selects, or choosing images, is the second most important part. More important than editing images. You may have 10-15 images in a burst or short succession, and you only want to work with one. Apple tried to do this with stacks, and sort of had some success, but they really nailed it with the burst mode in iOS 7. Combining the burst mode picker from iOS 7 with some kind of rating system or choosing system would be fantastic.
Everyone choose images differently, but when I'm working with an album I usually use the "comb" approach. I've heard this described different ways, but it works like this:
First, go through an album and tag anything that's decent (you might use two/three stars, or some other method). If some are really good then tag or rate them appropriately at this point.
Next, looking only at the "decent" images (three star or better smart album, for example), make a pass to ensure they're all up to snuff. Inevitably some need to be revised down and will pop out. If some outshine the pack, revise their ratings upwards.
Now, make another group of only the better images (e.g. a four star+ smart album) and go through them with the same logic - revise up and down as necessary.
Finally, make a "top" or "selects" album and you should have the best images. Go through and purge any that don't make the grade. Usually there is a rough number target I'm trying to hit for how many "good" images I need to output. Sometimes that number is tiny, like 5-6. Usually it's around 50 or so (starting from hundreds). Adjust ratings as appropriate.
The only real issue with the "comb" method occurs when you need things like a photo of each person in a group (so you have to make sure at least one picture of each person "makes the grade"), or certain short timed events. Professional photographers have many more use cases and workflows for selecting images, but making selects is by far the most annoying and time consuming part of the process for me. I put it off. I procrastinate. I don't like to do it.
One of the caveats for this process, of course, is that you'd need to be able to zoom in and out of the image, or use a loupe of some kind to asssess sharpness and detail. A larger iPad with a higher-resolution display would help, but there are no current monitors which can display images from even consumer digital SLRs at full resolution. Canon's Rebel T3i (600D) costs $469 on Amazon and takes 18MP images. The file pixels dimensions are 5184 x 3456. That's more than double the resolution of the Retina-display iPad Air in every dimension. A hypothetical larger iPad would probably not have the screen size or pixel density to show that in full 1:1 pixel resolution.
Editing is fun. It can be work, it can be tedious, but you take something and improve it. It can be done in chunks. Organizing and selecting is like working with email (think Inbox zero?). And it requires self judgement and criticism. I believe doing this is the hardest part of the application (though obviously not the only important part). It's a frustrating and tedious job, so the user experience should try to make it a bit less bad.
RAW adjustments are not easy on iOS. Top-tier RAW converters are numbered in the handful, and this is probably the most difficult part of the application from a technical perspective. New cameras come out all the time. Individual lenses can require different conversions and settings. Maybe just let Apple handle this somehow (but how? in the gateway uploader?). I don't have any good ideas about the RAW bottleneck, but I know people aren't going to accept JPEG only. I wouldn't. I have no clue how to do this and I think maybe the only hope here is a cloud-based backend for processing RAW. Otherwise, the app would always have to know about new cameras, and would have to bring a lot of processing horsepower to the table.
Ideally with RAW conversion the metadata for how the RAW conversion occurred will be stored, available, and editable at any time. In a cloud-based system, maybe the app only works with JPEG, but there's a "preview" of the RAW edits, and a cloud server delivers a JPEG to the app any time the metadata is changed. You play with some sliders, see a preview, and hit "develop" to get the full resolution JPEG output. This is ugly, but usually people convert from RAW in batches. Maybe the cloud service could "learn" over time (privacy implications notwithstanding) how you, or even everyone, likes to convert pictures from certain camera/iso/lens combinations. Excepting certain over/underexposed images, people could play with settings on their shoot or import, and then batch convert it to work in the app with individual photos.
Other editing is more straightforwards. Non-destructive isn't necessary, but reverting to the original image is always going to be required. Just keep two copies of everything. Remember, I'm positing a magical cloud service that handles and archives everything!
There are some editing wrinkles, of course. People will want to edit during the selection and organization process. There will have to be some brush-based editing tools. People will want to certain global edits (noise, sharpness, blurring) with painted masks or gradients.
Well, that's about it. It isn't easy, and it's not simple, but I think there's a potentially large market for a great iPad photo organization and editing application, and a service to back it.
I would pay upwards of $100 a year for a lossless cloud photo service that integrated well with my iOS devices (even without this application), regardless of having to use a gateway or portal application on a Mac. However, some people might not pay this. Professional photographers already have solutions. Consumers are conditioned these days that online services should be free. So maybe it wouldn't work out.
I would also pay $100 for this application, every two years. This is more than Aperture or Lightroom cost on the Mac. I think both Aperture and Lightroom leave a lot to be desired, and would prefer that the tedious task of making selects be performed on an easier platform such as an iPad. Again, I think consumers are trained not to value software on iOS, but in this case I believe professional photographers would be willing to pay for this since anything that saves a significant amount of time saves a significant amount of money.
In the end, I think iOS and Apple's mobile hardware probably isn't ready to handle the workflow, file size, RAW conversion, and we won't see this kind of application. And the store might not support it or the business model necessary (remember, EverPix went out of business, and they only stored lossy compressed images). Maybe if we see an iPad Pro with a larger screen at the end of 2014, and changes to what apps can do along with iOS 8. But maybe not.
I do think it is inevitable that the photo workflow will go mobile eventually. It's just a question of time. I hope someone gets this right sooner, rather than later, though.
