RAW does not work well.

Yesterday I commented on how long it takes to email a photo using Photos on the iPad if the original you imported using the Camera Connection Kit was in RAW format. Bottom line is that it takes so long (>4 minutes) that it’s a waste of time. (At this point Apple fanboys, blinded by Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field, can pour themselves a tall glass of STFU and exit stage left).

Today, I took a RAW snap, uploaded it from the G1’s SDHC card to the iPad using the Camera Connection Kit’s SDHC card reader, then emailed it from the iPad to a poor unenlightened individual who has the misfortune of using Windows 7 and MSFT Exchange at work.

The reply came back: “I cannot open the file”. Now being an empirical type (meaning I don’t write “it works” until I have tried it, unlike some of the jerks posting comments here), I also copied myself on the email to Mail app in Snow Leopard. I could see the JPG preview attached to the RAW file fine, and also noted that the RW2 RAW file, some 12mB in size, was attached to the email. However, all the Windows 7-using addressee could see was an RW2 icon which he could not open, not having the necessary RAW converter on his PC. Further, the large file size of the JPG to which the RAW file was attached may well have been blocked by his employer’s email system. So he saw nothing save an RW2 icon which he could not open. Like so:

I fished around in Photos on the iPad and also in iPad’s Settings->Photos but could not find an option to send only the JPG file as an email attachment. So, if you want your iPad-emailed photos to be visible to all email addressees, it seems that the right thing to do now is to forget RAW and shoot in JPG. That way only a JPG will be sent, visible to one and all.

Further, unlike sending photos by email using iPhoto on a Mac – which gives you a choice of which size you wish to send – there is no such option at present in iPad’s Photos app, meaning that whatever resolution you shoot the JPG with will be the size emailed. As my native JPG in the G1 is set high, that makes for large JPGs – not very useful when all an email generally dictates is a photo with a long side no more than 640 pixels.