Posts Tagged ‘iPad’

EYE-FI X2 PRO, RAW files (NEF) & iPad

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

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Posted in Photography and Movie, Tech, Uncategorized | No Comments

A couple of weeks ago I’ve been on a short holiday and that was a great moment to use my iPad and Eye-Fi WiFi SDCard for real. I did not bring my laptop so I had to rely on my iPad for transfering photos. It all worked out quit well and raised some questions too.

The setup was my iPad 2 with Eye-Fi app installed. My Nikon D90 was equipped with the Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8Gb memory card. A direct WiFi connection between iPad and Eye-Fi card was setup. Additionally, at the holiday location a public hotspot was available to use internet on the iPad.
I’ve set the camera to store both a basic JPG + RAW file. The Eye-Fi card was setup to transfer both file type to the iPad.

So I started taking holiday pictures. The first thing I noticed is that the Nikon RAW files (*.NEF) are transferred to the iPad as *.TIF files and within the iPad only a minor thumbnail is shown of this type of files. On the other hand, the JPG files were transfered too and shown correctly.

  • Is the TIFF file that is stored on the iPad actually a NEF file (Nikon RAW)?
Back home I’ve examined the TIF files and it turned out that they are the original NEF files. I believe they are renamed to TIF by one of the components so they are accepted by the iPad and more important, by Apple iCloud! So after transfering them to your PC, just rename them to NEF again.
Yes, the JPG and the TIF files are synced by iCloud. So it turned out that once my iPad was connected to the WiFi hotspot it began to sync the JPG and TIF files to iCloud. After a little while they showed on my iPhone too and back home, they synced perfectly to my PC! On the PC I could easily rename the TIF files to NEF again and import the files into Lightroom for further processing.
  • Can I transfer those files easily using an USB cable from iPad to PC?
Yes, connect the iPad to the PC and a removable drive is shown. Just copy the photo files you need. It’s good to know this option, but it might be obsolete because photos are synced using Apple iCloud!
iCloud only syncs the last 1000 photos, so if you take more than 1000 photos before saving them from the iCloud you might need the USB cable. (remember shooting JPG and RAW makes only 500 unique images sync because you have 2 files of a photo).
  • Can I configure the file type to be transferred (JPG and/or RAW) while I’m out in the field?

Actually this took a while to figure out and I’m not completely done with it. My current answer is:
Do it before you go out in the field. Connect both iPad and Eye-Fi card to a wireless network (I have not yet tested direct mode!)  and take a picture (to make the Eye-Fi really wakeup).  Then on your iPad in the Eye-Fi APP turn on or off the transfer of Photos (JPG), Video and/or RAW Files. Wait a couple of seconds and turn camera off and on so the Eye-Fi card reads its settings  from somewhere. Take a picture and test if it does what you want.

I still have to test this with Direct Mode. I will update this post with the results.

Conclusion:

Using the Eye-Fi card is great. Results of a shoot are directly visible on the iPad and files are stored (backup) on the iPad. The combination of the Eye-Fi with Apple iCloud is the best!  Back home, turn on the PC wait a while and all files are there. No cables necessary.

Only downside: You can’t see the difference between the JPG and RAW file on the iPad so you always have to guess when you open a file…. Does it open the high res JPG or the tiny RAW thumbnail. The fact that NEF files are renamed to TIF is not a big deal but when you think about it, it’s weird that it is necessary.

The Eye-Fi card can transfer images to online services like Flickr too. I have no need for that so I did not test it. 

 

 
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Eye-Fi Pro X2 – Transfer images wireless to iPad

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

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Posted in Computer How-To, iPad, Photography and Movie, Tech, Uncategorized | No Comments

Last week I stumbled upon the following video from F-Stoppers about transfering images from your camera to the iPad directly using an Eye-Fi SD card with Wifi.

I’ve noticed the Eye-Fi cards before, but I did not care about wireless transfering the images to my computer. It takes little effort to switch the SDcard from the camera to my computers cardreader and import the photos.
The video above showed a (for me) much more useful feature which is to see the photo taken within 3 seconds on my iPad. This is way better than looking on the camera LCD.

There is an option to directly connect your iPad to the Eye-Fi card which will only work when you are not within reach of a knownWifi network. The Eye-Fi site is not really clear about what happens when you ARE in reach of a known and configured Wifi network (i.e. your own home wireless network). It both works like you expect. Take a photo, wait a couple of seconds and it is shown on the iPad. The direct connection is a little faster then the indirect connection (i.e. when your iPad and Eye-Fi card are connected to a know Wifi network). The benefit of the indirect connection is that you iPad usually already has connection with the network and you have internet access available too.

I don’t use the other functionality of the Eye-Fi card because I have no need for it (yet). I usually first post process my images before posting it to sites like Flickr, so no need to upload them directly from my camera.

 
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Camerasync for iPad / iPhone

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

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Posted in Computer How-To, iPad, Photography and Movie | 1 Comment

As an addition to my article about photo workflow on the iPad, I can recommend the camerasync app to automatically copy your photos (JPG and/or RAW) from your iPad to the following external storage providers:

  • Dropbox
  • MobileMe iDisk
  • FTP servers
  • Amazon S3
  • Flickr
  • Box.net
The app is very straight forward. It searches for new photos in your iPad photo library and uploads those to any of the above configured cloud storages. This is great if you use the camera connection kit to copy your photos from your camera to the iPad. Then just open this camerasync app and your photos are uploaded.
A Dropbox account is free and if you use this link, we both get an additional 250 Mb of free storage space. This will give you 2250 Mb instead of 2000 Mb to start with !
 
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iPad and some photo workflow

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

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Posted in iPad, Photography and Movie, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I was wondering what kind of benefits I could get from my iPad in combination with my Photography hobby. This is one of the things where I believe the iPad brings me some benefits:

I got an iPad 64GB and a 3rd party camera connection kit (I name it CCK from now on). On Ebay you can get those for less than 10 euro’s (the camera connection kit of course). The CCK allows you to import your JPG and/or RAW files from you SD-Card or using USB cable directly from you camera. For this workflow it is best to set the camera to save a RAW+JPG. Both are imported into the iPad where the JPG is shown in the photo viewer. The JPG is also used to upload the photo to Flickr by i.e. Flickr Studio app. The RAW (and JPG) can be uploaded to Dropbox by using the Dropbox app.

When you shoot in RAW only you will find that during importing the RAW files, a thumbnail JPG is created for you Photo album on the iPad. When using 3rd party apps to send you photo’s to i.e. Flickr, you see that only that tiny thumnail is uploaded. Instead of a high res 12 Megapixel JPG you will find a very small size thumbnail. When shooting in RAW+JPG or JPG only you can send the highres image.

The mindmap below shows the parts connected.

 

 

 

The apps that I have installed are:

- Photosmith – To tag your images and sync with Lightroom !
- Filterstorm - Edit your images
- Snapseed – Quick Tuning
- Colorsplash - Selective color
- Photogene - Edit RAW files
- Flickr Studio – Do all you need with Flickr
- Dropbox - Online Storage

One remark. On the iPad 1 there might be a limit to save your JPG’s at 7.5 megapixel. With the iPad 2 this is 22 megapixel.

A Dropbox account is free and if you use this link, we both get an additional 250 Mb of free storage space. This will give you 2250 Mb instead of 2000 Mb to start with !

Update: Check this post about Camerasync app too!