With the arrival of the iPad retina display and iPhoto for iOS, one of the first questions I wondered was if iTunes would sync higher-resolution versions of my photos than the relatively small versions it feeds my iPad 1st Generation. Well I'm happy to report that the answer is yes!
While the iPad (1st Generation) is fed a scaled down version of your photos (1536 x 2312) by iTunes, the iPad (3rd Generation) can handle and will be fed much larger sizes. It appears that iPad (3rd generation) gets whatever the preview is that Aperture has generated based on the settings you've set in the "Previews" pane of the Aperture Application Preferences.
When I had my Photo Preview set to "fit within 1920x1920", that's what the iPad (3rd Generation) ended up with. But when I set my Photo Preview to "don't limit", then iPad (3rd Generation) got the full resolution jpg preview. There's also a quality control slider here that determines the compression on a scale of 1 to 12.
To test all of this, I deleted the iPod Photo Cache from the Aperture bundle, set my Photo Preview settings to "don't limit", and regenerated previews. I then synced the same two photos (one vertical and one horizontal) to each iPad, and from each iPad emailed the photos to my desktop Mac to check the sizes.
iPad (1st Generation):
Photo 01, 2312 x 1536, 1.1MB
Photo 02, 1536 x 2312, 1.1MB
iPad (3rd Generation):
Photo 01, 4288 x 2848, 3.2MB
Photo 02, 2776 x 4180, 2.8MB
Now maybe this was already the case with the iPad 2, but since I do not own one I could not test it. But I hope this information is useful to someone else. For anyone that wants to really take advantage of that Retina Display or use iPhoto for iOS to it's fullest, you'd want the highest resolution possible.
While the iPad (1st Generation) is fed a scaled down version of your photos (1536 x 2312) by iTunes, the iPad (3rd Generation) can handle and will be fed much larger sizes. It appears that iPad (3rd generation) gets whatever the preview is that Aperture has generated based on the settings you've set in the "Previews" pane of the Aperture Application Preferences.
When I had my Photo Preview set to "fit within 1920x1920", that's what the iPad (3rd Generation) ended up with. But when I set my Photo Preview to "don't limit", then iPad (3rd Generation) got the full resolution jpg preview. There's also a quality control slider here that determines the compression on a scale of 1 to 12.
To test all of this, I deleted the iPod Photo Cache from the Aperture bundle, set my Photo Preview settings to "don't limit", and regenerated previews. I then synced the same two photos (one vertical and one horizontal) to each iPad, and from each iPad emailed the photos to my desktop Mac to check the sizes.
iPad (1st Generation):
Photo 01, 2312 x 1536, 1.1MB
Photo 02, 1536 x 2312, 1.1MB
iPad (3rd Generation):
Photo 01, 4288 x 2848, 3.2MB
Photo 02, 2776 x 4180, 2.8MB
Now maybe this was already the case with the iPad 2, but since I do not own one I could not test it. But I hope this information is useful to someone else. For anyone that wants to really take advantage of that Retina Display or use iPhoto for iOS to it's fullest, you'd want the highest resolution possible.
