Purchasing advice for a traveling Artist

[phillytim]

Greetings!

My friend is a digital photography artist, who has about a terabyte of her work stored on her PC. She is interested in the new iPad or even a MacBook Pro laptop, mostly to show off her work, and she also wants to be able to show off an occasional PowerPoint slide show. Obviously an iPad is the easiest, lightest and has the most cool factor way to show off her work while traveling around the United States and occasional visits to foreign lands.

Even at the biggest 64Gb, an iPad will only allow a subset of her work to be stored on it. However, of course, there is the hurdle of how to transfer digital pictures back and forth from the iPad to the PC without being an overbearing nightmare to the computer neophyte that she is.

To factor into the equation, obviously in this day and age, there must be some way to be able to easily access the stored PC files remotely with an iPad or a laptop to allow her to show off her work without having to transfer files back and forth from the device.

Taking all of this into consideration, what advice do you have for what she should purchase and get her resources set up for either remote access or transfer of data to/from a mobile device?

Thanks so much, in advance!

 

[rovitotv]

A cheap easy solution

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC531ZM/A#overview

The link above is for the camera connection kit. I have one but have not had time to try it.

 

[kylera]

How much of her collection does your friend wish to carry around? Recently (I think) Seagate if not WD released a 2.5" external hard drive that holds two terabytes. Theoretically the camera connection kit can pick up on it, but I don't have said hard drive to test that.

I know the SD card reader portion of the kit can read up to 32GB. Beyond that, I don't know.

 

[hafr]

Greetings!

My friend is a digital photography artist, who has about a terabyte of her work stored on her PC. She is interested in the new iPad or even a MacBook Pro laptop, mostly to show off her work, and she also wants to be able to show off an occasional PowerPoint slide show. Obviously an iPad is the easiest, lightest and has the most cool factor way to show off her work while traveling around the United States and occasional visits to foreign lands.

Even at the biggest 64Gb, an iPad will only allow a subset of her work to be stored on it. However, of course, there is the hurdle of how to transfer digital pictures back and forth from the iPad to the PC without being an overbearing nightmare to the computer neophyte that she is.

To factor into the equation, obviously in this day and age, there must be some way to be able to easily access the stored PC files remotely with an iPad or a laptop to allow her to show off her work without having to transfer files back and forth from the device.

Taking all of this into consideration, what advice do you have for what she should purchase and get her resources set up for either remote access or transfer of data to/from a mobile device?

Thanks so much, in advance!

If she only needs to show her work off, she could just export the photos as compressed .jpg's weighing in at a lot less than the originals. There is just no need to carry around pictures at several MB's a piece if all she needs them for is showing what she can do.

As for the remote access, have you looked at an internet based option, such as Picasa or Flickr?

 

[phillytim]

The exporting pictures as compressed JPG's would be too much work for this older lady, the camera connection kit is a great idea and one that I have suggested to her especially since she may shoot pix with her digital cam on her trips, and the external hard drive is a good idea (but work involved in copying over what she'd want off her home PC).

Can the iPad view a PowerPoint presentation file?

 

[kylera]

Can the iPad view a PowerPoint presentation file?

Short answer: yes, but with issues.

Long answer: it depends on the complexity of the PPT files. As Microsoft hasn't released Office for the iPad, or even first-party viewer apps, you will have to rely on a third-party office app, which has a very high likelihood of messing with the PPT file in terms of formatting, fonts and/or animation. The roundabout ways COULD be overwhelming, from creating a video file of the PPT to dumbing down the PPT file for maximum compatibility.

 

[admwright]

The exporting pictures as compressed JPG's would be too much work for this older lady

If she uses iphoto or aperture then you can select which albums to sync with the ipad and the 'export' is handled for you. Then the photo app will have folders for each album.

 

[Macman45]

I just wonder if your friend might be better off with a MacBook Pro. The fiddling around with file formats etc. and the lack of a real file manager in the iPad make it a rather daunting task for the best of us at times.

An MBP with a 15" screen, a copy of Office for Mac, PowerPoint and storage to hand just seems to make more sense in this situation.

 

[phillytim]

Thanks MacMan, and the rest of you; it does appear to be right what you say MacMan.

I conversed with her, with her saying that she'd love an iPad because of the "cool factor" to show off her work and perhaps getting into reading some books on it.

But of course, if it doesn't do everything she wants, then she'll have to finangle her work on a traveling laptop and just using the iPad for reading books for now if she's intent on getting one. Or, at least holding off purchasing the iPad until Microsoft Office becomes available for it, which rumors may be saying will happen sooner or later with some good chance.

 

[Vantage Point]

I'm also a photographer that occasionally does presentations. For me, my 15" Macbook Pro has been a perfect tool. I have about 1TB of photos and keep about 500GB on my MBP as I installed a 750GB Scorpio black drive (see my signature). For presentations I use Apple's Keynote (I use iWorks instead of MS Office when I switched over to mac about 2 years ago). Also, for photo only presentations I use Aperture ($79) - I did a 2 hour presentation last week with my slides/pictures at 1080 pixels high so I could use a good digital projector. With aperture I can also show some live photo-editing during the presentation. It works perfectly.

For reading I use a $79 Kindle, which I absolutely love. For those that do a lot of reading the Kindle might be better than a iPad because it is so lightweight and much easier on my eyes due to lack of glare and backlight. Sure, it's personal preference and I kicked around the idea of an iPad vs Kindle for a while but once I bought one to try (you can always return it) about four months ago I can say that my reading has increased at least 3-fold. Partly because a Kindle is light and easy to hold, and partly because with these devices one can increase font size - at 50+ years old my eyes don't focus at close distances well so even with glasses, small fonts had become a strain on my eyes.

Anyway, the above works great for me and along with my iPhone I have not been able to justify the need for an iPad.

Hope that helps

 

[bhonder]

Greetings!



To factor into the equation, obviously in this day and age, there must be some way to be able to easily access the stored PC files remotely with an iPad or a laptop to allow her to show off her work without having to transfer files back and forth from the device.

Taking all of this into consideration, what advice do you have for what she should purchase and get her resources set up for either remote access or transfer of data to/from a mobile device?

Thanks so much, in advance!

I have a linksys e4200 router with an USB seagate hard-drive connected to it. The router has a built-in FTP server. There's not too much to configure, and it'almost click and go. Maybe Apple's router offer the same service.

I can use my iPad and access data wherever I am.

Maybe