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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

I'm an iOS user. But frankly, iOS sucks for this kind of work. I tried. Copy pasting is slow, file handling is unnecesserily clunky (just give me a file browser Apple). And exporting always needs some kind of workaround because I can't just pop in USB drives (which my wife's Surface Pro gladly accepts).

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You say you tried, but it sounds to me like you didn't try hard enough.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I do the vast majority of my photography work on a 9.7" iPad pro, with a Pencil. I'm constantly editing 24mp RAW files in Affinity Photo, which is about as close to full-fat Photoshop running on the iPad as you can possibly get, and let me tell you: It's fantastic.

I turn on my camera, I shoot some images. I open up Cascable, which connects to my camera's wifi, and I pull down some images. I flip through them and find one I like, the one I want to edit, so I click on that one and click "share", and then select Affinity Photo.

Affinity Photo opens. It's 95% of the power of desktop photoshop, albeit organised in subtly different ways. I do the things I would normally do: White balance, HSL, blemish touchup and even frequency separation. I click export, and save to camera roll.

It's in the camera roll, and I select it, and I share it over email to some friends, and to discord, and to instagram.

I don't get where the problem is.

Complete side note to the actual discussion, but I really like your description workflow, it sounds like you got yourself set up very nicely. What camera are you shooting with?

Also hobbyist photographer. Will definitely try this out. It's still hard to beat in my opinion as desktop workflow with the nice help of plugins etc.

I'm a hobbyist too. I was in China and Korea earlier this year for a couple of weeks and took 270GB of photographs. Do you think this would scale for me?

I tried all sorts of work, from text editing to drawing and music creation. They all kind of work but they are needlessly complicated. On the PC/Mac I can edit a sample in Audacity and just drop it into my DAW, in most cases probably via Drag'n Drop. On iOS I'd have no guarantee if that's even possible for the two apps I'm using.

Copying an edited photo (or drawing in my case) to a flash drive involves an external computer. It's not that it's impossible it*s needlessly complicated and clunky. I don't ant to try hard enough, I want the device to make my work easier.

You're a hobbyist. This isn't a professional workflow that works for a large number of images. And that tiny display?

What do you expect from a file browser that the current document picker interface doesn’t give you? The one missing feature I see is that you can’t just attach a USB storage device and it shows up as a source along with Dropbox, ICloud Drive, OneDrive, etc.

Personally, I’m imagining a future where you don’t need a USB drive to move files between devices. Dropbox, Creative Cloud, Universal AirDrop.

I would like the touchscreen paradigm to be expanded. Pencil, force touch, and perhaps something like Kinect/Soli:

https://atap.google.com/soli/

> Personally, I’m imagining a future where you don’t need a USB drive to move files between devices. Dropbox, Creative Cloud, Universal AirDrop.

Isn't that the paradigm we're currently in? Local file management is terrible on iOS. For professional photography (one the markets that Photoshop targets) cloud storage is not up to the task. The raw files from my work camera are 85MB each. I average about 1500 shots per shoot. That's a lot of time waiting for files to upload.

Personally I'm imagining a future where my files are not in the hands of the surveillance capitalists.

I’d love it if airdrop worked. I have had some success iphone to iphone (iphone6). However iphone6 to mid 2014 mbp on the latest stable osx and 9 times out of 10 it fails. I thought staying in the Apple ecosystem would prevent stress from integation issues, but the reality is unless you subscribe to icloud you are in for a rough ride.

I wonder why it’s failing for you. I can’t recall a single time Airdrop hasn’t worked for me since it was first introduced. Over the years I’ve used it between different kinds of both iOS devices and Macs.

Don’t you have a file browser now ? What are the main limitations you are hitting ?

That's true, but most of the time, I need to explicitly export files to the file browser, unlike on Android (the last time I used it) where I could just open the file another app has stored somewhere on the file system. I understand their reason for doing it this way, but it's cumbersome that every app has a different way of supporting file interaction, instead of using an already working system: a file system.

This is arguably a chicken-and-egg problem. If products like Photoshop make these pain points obvious to more users, Apple has good reason to improve such workflows.

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