Photographs on The iPad Photo Roll or There is Photo Folder

Using the Photo App that comes with the iPad

The application that comes with the iPad to let you look at your photographs gives the ability to look at all your photographs on your iPad. Also in there since iOS 5 you can look at what you have in the Photo Stream. These are the photos that get taken and pushed out to your other IOS devices and also to iPhoto or Aperture on your Mac, if you have that setup in those desktop apps. From Photo Stream you can save a photo so that you have it saved and kept in your Photo Roll. From the same menu you can do other things such as assign the photograph to a contact, use as wallpaper, tweet it or send it to a printer.

You can then organise photos into albums in the standard application. In your Photo folder You just tap on the edit button and you can create a new album, there is the button for that in the top left-hand corner. Then it is a fairly simple mechanism to choose from all of your photos and put them into a your album. You also have your photographs divided up into events and faces. To have photos sorted by faces you will have to organise that in iPhoto.

The standard application that comes with your iPad is not too bad at organising your photos, visitors and doesn’t do much more than that. And this is why you may be interested in finding something that will give you a way to sort photos by a filter, give you the ability to rotate photographs and also get access to the meta data. There are times, when a photographer will really need to have more information about the photograph, you will find useful information in the meta data of the your photos.

Using Photo Folder to Get More Functionality

Filtering will get it sorted

There is a button on the lower menubar, the third from the right which is your filtering a button. To be able to view the photos that have been tagged, then you do need to be inside a folder where the photos are. It doesn’t seem to be possible to search for photos that are tucked away inside sub folders. It would be very handy if it would be possible to search through all photos, otherwise you have to remember which folder that you should start looking in, before you can start your search.

Boolean searches – AND – OR

The filtering search is quite good in that you can do a Boolean search, where you might look for photos that are tagged with two different tags. With an AND search then you will just see photos that are tagged with both of the tags. With an OR search you will see all of the photos even if one of the photos only has one other tags applied to it.

You can also do a search in your photo folder that is based on favourites. If you have identified a photo as being a favourite then you can have that as one of your search criteria as well as looking at the tags. Photos can also be given ratings from 1 to 5 stars and again this can be one of your search criteria. You might want to look for all of the photos in a folder that have the tag of Catalonia and the tag of Clouds and has a five-star rating. That is how specific you can be with your photo search and to a certain extent, how well it work depends upon how good you are at tagging your photos.

Metadata is there but what can you do with it?

Being able to see the meta data can be handy, if you need to see things like the pixel height or width of the image, the shutter speed value, the exposure time or any of the other data that is stored within the exif data. The only thing that you are able to change in this data is the name of the file. It is not possible to change any of the other data while looking at the Meta data after tapping on the information button. The tags are stored in this area too, but you can only change them from the tagging dialogue box. To do any tagging you have to be looking at the thumbnails within the folder. You can’t tag an individual photo when you are looking at the photo full-screen.

Doing things to the photo when looking at a single photo

When you have the photo full-screen you are able to rate a photo with one to five stars, in the bottom right-hand corner. With the icon to the left of that, you can see all of the data associated with that photo. With the next icon you can choose to send the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Picasso, Flickr, e-mail and to print. If you have brought the photo in via the Wi-Fi and the photo is not in your photo library on your iPad then you can hit the Save to Library button.

If the photo has been geo-tagged then the icon in the middle will take you to a map to show you where the photo was taken. I was not able to test that as none of the photos I have available have been geo-tagged. From the fullscreen mode you can also start a slideshow. You may choose how long the slide is to show for, whether you want to have music playing during the slideshow and the type of transition that you would like to use. You can even have the slideshow repeat or do a little bit of a shuffle as it plays. When you are in the full-screen view, looking at your photos, you can tap on the dustbin icon if you want to get rid of a photo from that album.

The Verdict on Photo Folder

I found the Photo Folder application to be quite useful, there are number of facilities within the application that are quite handy. This app would be very good if you have a large number of photographs that you need to sort through to find the one that you want for specific purposes. For me, the tagging and filtering of the photos makes the application worth having. It would be nice to have a way to find files even when they are tucked away inside folders or subfolders. Without that application wide searching for photos then a solution would be just to throw all photos into one folder and make sure that you do the tagging diligently.