An interesting app.

Yesterday I speculated about using the iPad as a storage device for pictures taken on the road. Let’s assume for a moment that the iPad version of iPhoto supports Panasonic G1 RAW or whatever your choice of RAW format happens to be.

It should then be a simple matter to connect the iPad to your home computer and, using iTunes, sync the devices in the same way as you do with the iPhone.

Meanwhile, until the iPad becomes available and some experimentation is done, I came across a free application named iPhone Explorer which permits files to be moved between the iPhone and your desktop.

Here’s a screen shot:

What you are seeing is a Finder-like directory of the iPhone – mine is the 2.5G original, by the way. The file named _1050431.RW2 is a RAW file I dragged and dropped from my SDHC card, inserted in my desktop, onto the iPhone. I then tried drag and dropping that same file onto the hard drive in my desktop and it worked perfectly. So if this application works with iPad (and there’s a chance it will or that an update will be crafted) you can use the iPad as a storage device in lieu of external drives when travelling with your camera. Where am I going with this? Simple. The less you have to carry on a trip the more likely you are to focus on taking pictures.

The advantage of an application like iPhone Explorer is that I do not want my photos which I have stored on the iPad downloaded into iPhoto on my desktop. I want the RAW originals imported into Lightroom. (Lightroom can already import JPFGs but that is of little interest to me). So by using the iPad as a storage and preview device, I can cull the losers on the iPad and, once home, import the remainder by drag-and-drop into Lightroom.

The only change I made to iPhone Explorer was to set the minimum file size it will accept on the iPhone at 14mB – slightly larger than the largest RAW file size produced by the Panasonic G1.

As you can see my iPhone only has 2gB of space, or enough for some 180 RAW files but this does prove that if you can get the RAW file into the iPhone (or iPad) then it’s easy to transfer it to your desktop. The issue then becomes how to get the file into the iPad, and I’ll have more on that when I have one in my hot little hands – if I can wrest it from our 8 year old son, that is!