TL;DR

iPadPro: A gorgeous, impossibly thin object that is a joy to behold but accessories and lack of pro software is taking some of the wind out.

The iPad with the accessories

I got the new M4 iPad Pro 13 inch yesterday. Blown away by the feel of the incredibly thin and light pane of glass and aluminum. It is simply a beautiful object. I had it up and running in about 2+ hours, copying data over from my old iPad Air from 2020. The screen is great but honestly its dual OLED was lost to my aging eyes.

The new Pencil Pro squeeze gesture provides quick access to menu items and in a very quick test I found it useful in the GoodNotes app. The pencil attached with the magnets is wobblier than before as the edge of the device is so thin. I found it hard to snap on the pencil and then hard to keep it on the thin edge.

The beauty becomes a beast as soon as you attach the magic keyboard. This was my first experience with the keyboard, and it is very heavy. I found it very awkward to attach and detach the iPad from the keyboard with metal-on-metal grinding sounds that gave me shivers. I cannot imagine wanting to keep the keyboard on all the time. It simply kills the advantages of the thin and light design. If you want a keyboard attached at all times, then I think a MacBook Air is a much better computer.

Workflow with Lightroom

When I travel, I usually carry both my iPad Air and the MacBook Pro. One of my goals for this iPad is to ideally be the only device I carry. So making it my initial photo ingest device is pretty important to me. So I gave that workflow a shot.

I connected Canon R5 directly to the iPad with a short USB-C cable. In a few seconds I was able to see photos start to show up. However, things didn’t go so well from this point.

·      Since R5 supports to cards, for data protection purposes I choose the option to record to both cards simultaneously. So in the camera there are two copies of every photo: one in each card. Lightroom on the iPad stupidly showed me two copies of each photo thoroughly confusing me and double counting to over 800 photos when I didn’t really think I had that many. Having said that, when I selected all to the import, it only selected one copy – so that was awfully smart!

·      To import 400 photos it took over 7 minutes. Yes, these are large photos – about 40 MB each (~20 GB total) but still that’s a long time. I routinely import these photos on the M3 MacBook Pro and it takes about half that time.

·      After showing a message that photos were imported, Lightroom seemed to still be importing photos as displayed in a countdown displayed via the cloud icon popup. This didn’t last two long (maybe a couple more minutes) but still annoying to get two import messages.

·      The Lightroom iPad app does not support features available in Classic app for years such as the ability to rename files, apply starter develop preset, specify default keywords, and many others. This is annoying and makes my remaining workflow longer 😕.

·      I started to proceed with my initial culling where I start with the first photo in ascending order by capture date and decide whether to keep it (mark as ‘picked’ by pressing ‘P’) or reject it (mark as ‘rejected’ by pressing X.) and hit the arrow key to move on to the next photo (no Auto-Advance in the iPad app 😕). An interesting observation is that I thought Lightroom Cloud used ‘Z’ for pick instead of ‘P’ but happy to see that the iPad app is using the same shortcut keys as the classic app.

·      This was a very painful and slow exercise. The way classic works is that it generates previews in the background for all your photos so if you give it a few minutes of head start, you never have to wait for the image to render. However, the iPad app did not such thing and it tried to generate a preview when I hit the arrow key. This is super painful if you are trying to quickly get through 100s of photos – which is what I do all the time! I don’t know why Lightroom on the iPad does not create previews in the background or that it does but is just awfully slow at it. Or that background jobs are not allowed by iPadOS? Who knows. What I know is that it isn’t a viable experience at the moment 😕.

·      Eventually Lightroom on the iPad wirelessly uploaded all 20GB of these photos to Lightroom Classic running on my MacBook at which point I proceeded to delete the originals from the iPad. Smart Previews still remain on the iPad and that’s fine for most culling and editing.

·      Next part of my workflow is to cull more, followed by editing, metadata updates (keywords, faces, geolocations, etc.), and then one last round of culling before I export the set to Apple Photos for sharing with family and friends and for having it on our phones. None of these are possible on the Lightroom app on the iPad. But I was to get started on this process on the MacBook a few hours after the initial ingest.

Bottomline is that the Lightroom app on the iPad Pro is barely sufficient to be used for initial Ingest and culling. That means I can potentially drop this as one of the reasons for carry the MacBook on my travels. There are other use cases as well that I will continue to explore over the next few weeks.

If Lightroom on the iPad had several more of the same capabilities available to me in the Classic Lightroom app then I think it would be a much more valuable device in my workflow. For now, I will have to be happy with using it as a device for culling in the later part of the workflow when it already has to deal with previously generated Smart previews.