Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

3: On-location photo shoot

Just because the iPad 2’s camera isn’t up to much, don’t rule out the iPad as a serious photographer’s tool. Many photographers take a laptop on location to review shots, but the iPad is even better for this task. Its superb screen, tough design, small size and low weight are better than any £400 laptop can offer, and it browses and zooms photos extremely responsively.

One notable downside is that lack of a card slot or USB socket for getting photos onto the iPad. One option is the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit (£25), which includes two adapters, one for SDHC cards and one for USB cables. We balk at paying this much for something Apple should have included in the first place, though, and the adaptors are hardly elegant, protruding from the iPad’s dock connector.

Eye-Fi cards let your camera send images directly to your iPad

We prefer the Eye-Fi X2 range of SDHC cards with integrated WiFi adapters. With one of these on your camera and the free Eye-Fi app running on the iPad, photos are transferred wirelessly within seconds of being taken. It’s perfect for assessing shots as you go, and also for entertaining guests at weddings and other special occasions. Once the iPad is online, the app can send photos wirelessly to your computer or to sharing sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Picasa.

Sadly, Eye-Fi cards can’t currently transfer RAW files straight to an iPad – the 8GB Eye-Fi Pro X2 (£80 from Amazon) supports RAW transfers but only to a computer. However, shooting in RAW + JPEG mode provides a workaround, letting you inspect the JPEGs on the iPad and transfer the RAW images to the PC later.

We found the app a little clumsy for browsing photos, but double-clicking the Home button kept the Eye-Fi app running in the background, whereupon we could launch the iPad’s own Photos app to browse and inspect JPEGs.

Got an iPad and a copy of Lightroom on your PC or Mac? Then you’ll want to get hold of PhotoSmith

A better option than the Photos app is PhotoSmith (£12.99). It automatically jumps to the most recently added photo and includes comprehensive tools for tagging photos with colour labels, star ratings, keywords and a host of other information. It’s easy to sort and filter photos by date, rating or label and group them into Collections.

Best of all, it will transfer photos directly to the excellent Adobe Photoshop Lightroom across the home network, with all these tags synchronised with Lightroom. Previously used keywords are synced from Lightroom to the iPad, which saves typing them again.

Sadly, using an Eye-Fi card along with PhotoSmith to pass images to Lightroom doesn’t work for RAW files – we tried to synchronise the JPEG file’s tags with the RAW files copied separately, but the iPad’s penchant for renaming files put a stop to that. However, there’s talk of a fix in the pipeline, and RAW files work fine when using PhotoSmith and the iPad Camera Connection Kit.