Connor Photography wrote:
I am looking for an App that can view photos from an SD card (I have an adapter) without importing the files into iPad. 

Anyone?

I know there are a few companies that make an app/wireless adapter combo that will allow you to view the contents of an SD card but I've never used any so I can't recommend any.  They come at a variety of price points from a few tens of dollars and up.

With the various wired adapters (that plug into the charging/data port on the ipad) you can only import the photos into the photos app.  No viewing-only beyond thumbnails.

A pretty dumb limitation but it is a limitation nonetheless.

Zack Zoll wrote:
Not that it has an impact on product availability, but I wonder how much of that is by design, and how much is a software limitation. Does iOS lack native browsing support for external storage because no Apple devices have card slots, or because they're trying to force Apple/iTunes integration?

I think it's a product of the locked-down-edness of the physical platform and some blindness to certain use-cases.  They have OS-level support for mounting attached devices like USB sticks and SD cards but the mount points are sandboxed away and none of the APIs support accessing them in any way.  Apple could, of course, allow this access but they don't.

As I mentioned before, there are *many* wireless solutions that come with their own app for viewing/downloading so i don't think it's anything nefarious beyond a blindness to hardwired use cases.

It would certainly be something to consider for the next iOS update, if Apple wants the iPad Pro to be the editing device they claim it will be.

For editing purposes the functionality is already there.  You can plug in a card or a camera and copy your data to the device.  But the OP was talking about merely *viewing* which is different.

Motordrive Photography wrote:
this is what I was referring to

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1 … _ipad.html

Yeah, that's more than just viewing. Essentially what that is is a hack to install a full OS onto your iPad for running tethering software. The disadvantage is that it isn't really a full OS so you can't run Photoshop or whatever too, but the advantage is that it has a processor boost, and you don't need any programming knowledge to do it

Wye wrote:

Zack Zoll wrote:
Not that it has an impact on product availability, but I wonder how much of that is by design, and how much is a software limitation. Does iOS lack native browsing support for external storage because no Apple devices have card slots, or because they're trying to force Apple/iTunes integration?

I think it's a product of the locked-down-edness of the physical platform and some blindness to certain use-cases.  They have OS-level support for mounting attached devices like USB sticks and SD cards but the mount points are sandboxed away and none of the APIs support accessing them in any way.  Apple could, of course, allow this access but they don't.

As I mentioned before, there are *many* wireless solutions that come with their own app for viewing/downloading so i don't think it's anything nefarious beyond a blindness to hardwired use cases.


For editing purposes the functionality is already there.  You can plug in a card or a camera and copy your data to the device.  But the OP was talking about merely *viewing* which is different.

You're not wrong. Apple stuff all works really well on paper, and in practice if you use it exactly the way they expect you will.

The problem is that the sort of person that is likely to buy a $1000 tablet with a $100 accessory pen for mobile editing is likely to have a camera with lots of pixels, which means large file sizes. That rules out wireless transfer unless you only need one or two files, and without a browser function you can't go through stuff with a client on the spot - you can only do a few, or you can sit there for half an hour while it downloads an entire set of 36MP files - assuming you have enough space open on the tablet.

Ideally, you would use it to say,'let's look at the photos and see what they'd look like finished.' And then you and the client could go through it on the spot. In practice, that only works if the client knows exactly which images they want to see edited.

If you were a Sony or Samsung shooter, I have no doubt that those company's experience with wi-fi would mean that the iPad works exactly as intended. But Nikon has a terrible wi-fi system, and Canon's is merely acceptable. So, cables.

The downloading system works excellently on paper, and everything in Apple's device indicates that it would work well in practice. But at a certain point you need to make some design decisions based on other brands' products that are likely to be used with yours, and accept that you may need to add or remove features to better integrate your product with others out there.

Apple does not have a strong history with this.