Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

Egged on by experienced iPhone and iPad purists who decried my resistance to using iTunes to upload images to my iPad (which, at this point, is on the border of becoming adjudged the most colorful and heaviest micro-sized cafeteria tray in New Jersey and nothing more) I uploaded a small batch of images via iTunes.

I transferred two folders totaling 92 image files (111MB or, by actual count, 117,046,345 bytes) of data. It took a long time (as compared to downloading 111MB from a camera, which is something I do often) and the results are startling.

The images all appeared where they belong on my iPad, and they look good. But the host PC—which has never been used for image processing, and has never seen iTunes until this day—was awarded a folder labeled iPod Photo Cache that contains 92 folders, 92 files, and all of this occupies 70,171,684 space.

So I have two questions.

1) Why must we create a new image database on our host PC to perform a simple upload?

and

2) Now that the images are on our iPad, what good are they since they have been arbitrarily resized beyond our control? I.e., we can show them to clients, but we can’t transfer them because the resolution has been changed.

No, it appears that we’re clearly better off with a PC, even a hamstrung Netbook PC, that can handle manipulating image files at full resolution.

Surely we’ll see apps that make the iPad indispensable for photographers, but so far, iWonder.

—Jon Sienkiewicz