[Pavel]

My wife got a new iPad 2 as a combined Christmas/birthday present. I can use it when she isn't. We are quite new to Apple stuff and I wonder what apps one should look at. the context of this forum, I am thinking mostly of photo-related apps, but obviously other apps would be of interest. Those of you that are old hands with this - please advise. I am interested both in terms of specific apps and an efficient ways of searching and evaluating before purchase. Thanks.

Background to the purchase. I got a KOBO E-reader, which broke 4 months after purchase. After 3 weeks of trying to get it serviced, I contacted local paper (The Star), which had a pile of complaints from others. The Star reporter e-mailed Kobo and 45 minutes later, I had e-mails and calls from managers and a replacement at the door the following day. Before it broke, I showed my wife all the wonderful free and cheap books you can download. She loved the idea, but her vision is worse than mine and wanted something bigger with easy to read screen. Once she saw the iPad, that was it - she lost interest in all other (cheaper) alternatives. Since she can not use it at work, I got to play with it (mostly as an e-reader, but I browse on it too and it is a wonderful GPS unit). On the advice of a friend, we got the unit that has the 4 G hardware built in. With that, you can use GPS even without data plan and the app is free. I guess since we (ahm my wife) have it, we would like to know what else to do with it. Thanks guys.

[shuttertalk]

Hey congrats on your purchase! I've got an iPad 1 but I find I don't use it that much - my kids use it more actually, playing kids games and watching kids shows.

For reading I can't go past my Amazon Kindle with the e-ink screen. I had some problems with my Kindle too but Amazon support was fantastic and they immediately sent replacements without any hassles.

However I can see how the larger and brighter iPad screen can be more appealing and might cater better for your wife's needs, especially reading in dim lighting (e.g. in bed).

In terms of apps my brother and his wife brought their iPad2s with them on holidays to Fiji and they had the camera transfer kit that allowed them to download photos from their SD cards. Honestly I think it's more trouble than it's worth - and you can't store that much anyway on the internal memory. It did make for some nice slideshows though which they could enjoy throughout the trip instead of waiting to get home, and they made some nice collages and "albums", although I can't recall what apps they used.

There are also some RAW converters like PiRAWnha but again I see very limited benefit given the above, and think maybe a netbook or an ultraportable laptop would be much easier to use while travelling.

Adobe also has some apps which allow you to interface with photoshop, although I haven't tried them.

[NT73]

Pavel - just go onto the iTunes site and type in (free) photo related apps and you should get a list of them read the reviews. There are sort of 100s of them. Pick and dip. :/
Because I have iPod touch with a naff camera - 0.3 MB or something like that, I don't (if I can help it) use it for photos - wheras the iPhone has 5MB camera?
We were brought up with the old fashioned phone (Next doors)

[Toad]

Dpreview just published a roundup article on this very topic today:

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/0403327...ps-for-ios

[Pavel]

Robert, the applications listed on the DP review site are intended as presentation apps. I was looking for something more like photosmith ( http://www.padgadget.com/2011/04/30/phot...pp-review/ ). I like that it can do rating and it syncs with Lightroom. It works with Bridge too, but I think that transfer is not so simple I understand. I am still new to this, so I am not sure I fully understand. It would be nice if the software had some limited Camera Raw features, as most of my photos look underexposed in RAW and I need to lighten the shadows to reliably view and rate the photos.

[Toad]

Fair enough. From what I have heard, there isn't really any support for viewing RAW on the iPad (and even if there was, what kind of RAW would that be?). The fellow that I went to Iceland stored all of his photos on an iPad. He took RAW+jpeg, so that he could store the RAWs for later and still view the jpegs on the iPad.

[Pavel]

Robert, the Photosmith (see link in my post above yours) does recognize most RAW file formats (including mine)

[Kombisaurus]

I've tried quite a few photo-editing apps (paid and free) and Filterstorm Pro was the one I setlled on and used pretty much exclusively on my travels. It's not free, but you get what you pay for. And it seems to read RAW, but you can only tweak the image post RAW conversion.

Photosynth is a free must-have app for photographing panoramas.

If you run a SmugMug gallery then both SmugMug and SmugShot are essential.

Flickstackr is a really nice free Flickr explorer.

KingCamera is a decent replacement to the standard camera app.

That's all the handy photo apps I can think of at the moment.

[Pavel]

Thanks Adrian. This is very helpful. I am checking the apps. What did you mean by:

If you run a SmugMug gallery then both SmugMug and SmugShot are essential.

Thanks

Pavel

[Kombisaurus]

lol... of course you *do* have a smugmug gallery!

The Smugmug app gives a nice way of browsing galleries and caching them for fast offline viewing.
Smugshot is a quick and simple uploader to smugmug.
Together you can upload and download images in a neater way than through the Smugmug website.
Both are nice simple clean little apps. It's just a shame they aren't combined into a single app.

[Pavel]

Thanks Adrian. I was confused by Smugmug and Smugmug Gallery. I just call the site Smugmug. I am surprised that the app has the same name and than I was not sure what is sm gallery, if you are talking about sm already. (If you do not understand, do not worry, it is not important and I barely understand what i just said)