If you have a new enough iPhone or iPad, you can now edit photos on the device. Photo Charlie Sorrel
iOS 5 is here, and with it iCloud. ICloud is the biggest step yet towards cutting the cord with desktop computers, and it arguably does away with the old-fashioned idea of files and folders. One of the best parts of iCloud is Photo Stream which, in combination with the new Photos app, lets you forget about the computer completely. Almost.
Camera
First, and most noticeable, are the new Camera and Photos apps. Any iOS 5 device can now snap a photo using the volume-up hardware switch (which is right next to the lens in the iPad 2 and almost laughably hard to use without photographing your finger). iPhone users can also double-tap the home button on the lock-screen to reveal a shortcut button that launches straight to camera for quick shooting.
You can also call up a grid overlay, lock the exposure and autofocus before recomposing (iPhone 4 and 4S-only), and pinch to zoom as you are shooting. When you have snapped a picture, you can swipe right to enter your camera roll. This won’t work if you accessed the camera through the lock-screen shortcut.
Once you are viewing you photos, you can now edit them. This is done the same way as if you were in the Photos app itself. Open an image, tap edit and you can rotate and crop (with or without constraints), correct for redeye and enhance the image. This last just adds a little pep, tweaking the white balance and contrast.
The edits seem to be non-destructive: You save your image, but if you choose to edit it again later you can still revert to the original.
From here you can also share images (email, Twitter, Messages), assign to a contact, print, copy or choose to use as wallpaper.
Photos
Head over to the Photos app and you can use all of the same editing tricks, only you now have access to all the photos on your iDevice, not just your photo roll. Curiously, when editing photos here, you are prompted to save a copy. Thus, you cannot revert, but you still have the untouched original. Editing won’t work on the iPad 1.
You can also rearrange the photos into albums, although it isn’t obvious at first how you might do this.
First, you need to tap the arrow-in-a-box icon, the one usually used for sharing things. Then you select the images you want to use and tap the “Add To…” button. Then choose to make a new album or add to an existing one. Note — if you cancel here, then all your photos are deselected. This is a pain if you start off adding to an existing album and then decide you want a new one instead. You’ll have to start over.
You can also choose to add images to an album from within it, using the same arrow-in-a-box icon. Oddly, you can re-add the same photos and they’ll show up as duplicates. I assume that this is a bug.
Photo Stream
Finally, there’s Photo Stream. Any photos you snap with the camera, or save from various applications (including screenshots), or import using the camera connection kit. are added to your Photo Stream. And any photos in your Photo Stream are uploaded automatically to iCloud (over Wi-Fi) and then beamed down to any other Photo Stream-enabled devices.
Full resolution files are sent back to your computer for safekeeping, and kept in the cloud for 30 days. Smaller JPGs are sent to the iDevices, which helps speed up downloads. If you regularly use your iPad to import RAW photos from your camera, though, Photo Stream will send the whole files up to iCloud. I spend half a day with unresponsive Internet before I realized what was happening.
Any edits you make on the iOS devices will be mirrored immediately on other devices.
The master library is stored on your Mac or PC. On a Mac you can use Aperture or iPhoto, and this is the only place a computer comes in. The workaround is to save files out of the Photo Stream and to you camera roll to keep permanently. You might be glad you bought the 64GB model after all. One thing to note: Once something is in your stream, it is impossible to remove. This, too, sounds like a bug.
Video
Finally, on a related topic, iMovie on the iPad and iPhone has been updated. It will now work with movie files imported from your camera, which means no more tedious workarounds. It now recognizes Motion JPG video from my Panasonic GF1, although it won’t see AVCHD Lite files. It seems like anything that can be imported via the camera connection kit should work. Give it a try.
Photo Stream really shows what Apple’s strategy is for iOS. Sure, we don’t need a computer now, but neither do we need to worry about our files at all. Our photos and videos are automatically backed up and available wherever we want them. No more thumb drives, no more e-mail attachments. It just works.
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