Cloud WIth Strings Attached

My ups and downs with the iPad Pro continue. The experience is far from smooth mainly because I'm having trouble getting adjusted to Apple's philosophy and the restrictions of iOS and iOS Apps. One of the reasons why I selected the Pro has been the screen. I knew it would be the best tablet screen money could buy and I wanted the best screen for portable photo viewing. Photos are also the reason I opted for the 128GB version - to have them loaded on the device and accessible all the time, especially on the road when Internet connections are neither fast nor stable.

I was entirely surprised when I learned it was not possible to load photos on the iPad. Of course there are dozen or so apps dedicated to photos on an iPad. But none works offline with full resolution. They either require a cloud service available online when viewing or cache photos, but at reduced resolution. Suffice to say Apple's default way of transferring photos has not changed since the first photo capable iPod, released 11 years ago. You have to do it via iTunes and it takes hours (as it goes off and compresses the entire photo library) and gigabytes (the compressed cache sits on the host computer's hard drive). I just could not find a way to simply load full resolution JPGs on the iPad. Until it dawned on me Apple had an accessory called the Lighting SD Card Camera Reader. So I went off to prepare an SD card that pretended to be just taken out of a camera.

It took me a while to figure out the required folder structure: there has to be a folder named DCIM and inside it one or more folders with photos, each of them has to have exactly 8-character long name. Then in each subfolder there have to be JPG files, again 8-characters long, with special names. In my case DSC+5-digit numbers, such as DSC00028.JPG worked. I went to Adobe Lightroom and in the Library module selected a collection to export. Lightroom has very flexible library management module and among many things it lets you rename or export a set of photos, naming them according to any template you want. So I selcted DSC + 5 digit, zero-filled sequence and it did the job. It took a few hours to export 12 thousand photos totaling some 60GB. Then another hour to save them on an SD card and two more hours to import the card to the iPad's Camera Roll. The trick worked, albeit with one caveat: iPAD does not always import the photos in sequence, so while most of the photos are in correct order, some of them are scattered randomly. But at least they are in full resolution and load on screen instantly, regardless if I'm connected or not.

So here I go. A.D. 2016, the era of everything - Cloud, and I'm using a removable drive (feels like a floppy disk!) to transfer content from one connected device to another connected device. It is probably so because I want to achieve something entirely non standard: watching full resolution photos on a premium tablet.