Photo Fun on your iPad – iPad Summer Travel Series
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Your iPad is the perfect summer travel companion. From planning your trip, reading a book by the pool, surfing the net or sending e-mails to friends and family, the iPad can do it all. But can you use your iPad to manage all the photos you take on your trip or will you need to lug around a laptop? The good news is, for most people, the iPad is all you’ll need.
The first thing you’ll want to get is Apple’s hard to find iPad Camera Connection Kit. With this kit you’ll get two small adapters that attach to your iPad’s dock connector. One of the adapters has a USB port so you can connect your digital camera directly via a standard USB sync cable. The other adapter in the kit has a standard SD card slot, so if your camera uses SD memory cards you can quickly upload images by simply popping your camera card into the adapter.
But what if your camera doesn’t support SD? Some high end DSLRs use CompactFlash and most Sony cameras use Sony’s proprietary MemoryStick format. You could always use a USB cable, but you might want to consider Lexar’s 24 in 1 card reader (Amazon $23.59). This nice little device can handle 24 different memory card formats and is great if you have you have several different camera each with a different card format.
Now that you have your photos loaded in your iPad’s Photo Library what do you do? One of the easiest ways to share them with friends and family is via e-mail. Go to Photos on the iPad and select the photos you want to send and the photos are automatically added to your e-mail message. (Check out our Quick Tip for a quick way to send several photos using Mail).
There are also several great apps for sharing your photos with online photo sites like Picasa, Flickr, MySpace, Photobucket and Facebook. Sort Shots is one of the more versatile photo organizing apps for the iPad and lets you easily share your photos with MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa. If you’re a Flickr user, FlickStackr is a nice app for browsing, uploading and editing your photos on Flickr and only costs $0.99.
If you want to customize your photos and give them a special look, there are a number of cool photo editing and effects apps for the iPad. Photogene is a great app with a number of high-quality editing tools to let you crop, straighten, sharpen, color adjust and resize your photos directly on your iPad. If you’re looking to add some creativity to your shots, then Photo fx Ultra and Color Splash are two apps you’ll want to grab. Photo fx Ultra is a powerful effects tool with a huge collection of special effects filters and editing tools to give your photos a unique look and feel. Color Splash let’s you take an ordinary photo, convert it to black and white and then selectively “paint” color back into the shot. The effect is stunning and always a crowd pleaser.
With a few accessories and a handful of essential apps, your iPad is all you’ll need to enjoy your summer vacation. The best part, is you’ll be able to easily share all of your great memories with family and friends.
Editor’s Note: Our PadGadget team plans to post app and gear reviews that we recommend for summer travel. This is the third post in our series. Be sure to check out or other first two posts in the series here and here. If you have an app or product recommendation, please leave a comment or send us an e-mail.
