It seems that lots of folks got iPads recently (Christmas gifts?) and have been asking me for app recommendations, specifically for photography apps. Here’s what I use and love, broken down into a few logical groups:
Clicking the links with each app will launch the iTunes page that provides more information about the app (and from which you can download the app for your iPad).
Apps for Viewing/Displaying Photos
- Portfolio for iPad – Britton Photography: a nice, customizable Portfolio application. This is what I use to display my work on my own iPad. In addition to creating galleries and setting either manual or automatic slideshow options, Portfolio for iPad allows for one’s logo to be added to the galleries which provides a more professional viewing experience than the built-in Photos app.
- Keynote – Apple Inc.: Apple’s slideshow presentation program. Mac users love Keynote for it’s various advantages over PowerPoint and it’s translated well to the mobile version. I use Keynote for making presentations to groups (usually including my photography).
- The Guardian Eyewitness – Guardian News and Media Limited: a very beautiful visual display of news photos, produced by The Guardian in a partnership with Canon. In addition to the daily photo (with caption), each photo is presented with a related photography tip.
- LIFE for iPad – Time Inc.: a beautiful visual exploration of the photography collection of LIFE Magazine.
Apps for Editing Photos on the iPad
- Photogene for iPad – Omer Shoor: My favorite overall photo editing app. Features include cropping, color adjustment, adding filters, rotation, and more. This is a must-have if you’re going to edit photos on the iPad.
… and that’s it. I really don’t do very much photo editing on the iPad, but I’ve found that Photogene can handle everything I’ve wanted it to do. I’ve tried out a couple other apps that didn’t impress me much (to the extent that I can’t recall their name). I’m currently evaluating an app called piRAWnha which is an iPad RAW file processor but I haven’t yet really done enough to give any conclusions (look for that next week).
Other Productivity/Utility Apps
These aren’t photo-specific but I find them very useful.
- Instapaper – Marco Arment: A great app that allows one to easily bookmark items (from any computer or iOS or Android mobile phone) for reading later. The full text of the article is saved to Instapaper, ads are removed, and the app presents the material in a great, easy-to-read format. I love reading on the iPad and a huge chunk of my reading consists of articles via Instapaper.
- GoodReader for iPad – Good.iWare Ltd.: View and manage documents in any number of formats including PDF.
- Dropbox – Dropbox: the popular file synchronization service. Yes, it works well with the iPad. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, use this link to sign up and we’ll each get an extra 250mb of free space.
- 1Password Pro – Agile Web Solutions: An easy-to-use, very powerful password management program. Store logins, software licenses, or any other bits of information you want to keep secure. You can optionally use Dropbox to sync with the OS X or Windows version of the application as well.
- iThoughtsHD (mindmapping) – CMS: I like to map out ideas for writing and presentations using a mind map, and iThoughtsHD is pretty slick including options to synchronize with desktop apps in a variety of formats.
- OmniFocus for iPad – The Omni Group: a great task and project management system based on the principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done
system.
