My iPad photo workflow: intake

My iPad photo workflow: intake

Part one of three easy pieces

I’ve been a Mac user since the PowerBook days and have been very comfortable editing digital images on location since 2000.

Venezuela hospital floor April 1, 2000, working on a Mac PowerBook creating a “real-time” website documenting reconstructive and orthopedic surgery by an NGO. Each day, we uploaded digital images to a server using a dial-up AOL connection — Digital Photo (Nikon D1) by Tom Burton.

Nineteen years, several Mac books, and an iMac later, I bought my first iPad. Honestly, I had no idea how much I would use an iPad other than for casual browsing and movies. I purchased the basic model with 128 GB of storage.

The possibility of using it for photo editing was just a passing thought. If there is a standard software in photojournalism for the culling, captioning, and transmitting photos, it is Photo Mechanic, the Mac and PC-based software from CameraBits. The trouble is, they don’t have an iPad version.

My initial exploration of alternatives led me to an app named ShutterSnitch, an early pioneer for receiving photos on an iPhone or iPad via Wi-Fi SD cards in cameras. In the mid-20-teens, I used eyeFi cards (now obsolete) with my Canons. ShutterSnitch allowed me to explore using Fuji’s built-in Wi-fi to transfer images to the iPad.

Wi-fi on early Fujifilm cameras was mediocre at best. ShutterSnitch with those early Fujis was painful and slow. But Shutter Snitch with the Canon 5D Mk IV built-in Wi-Fi was impressive.