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Comment by maverick2007 | Hacker News Reader

maverick2007

I'm curious whether you can actually import RAW photos into this iPad. According to [1], importing huge (42 Megapixel) RAW files into the last gen iPad Pro was pretty much unusable. I can definitely see myself making this my travel laptop, replacing my 2013 Macbook Air if I could connect my camera, import all of my photos for the day, maybe do some light editing and then export them to an external hard drive.

[1] https://paulstamatiou.com/made-on-an-ipad-pro/#photo-editing

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Yes, on IOS 12 I regularly import very large RAW photos on my first generation iPad Pro. The RAW importing workflow is finally as good as the JPG, meaning it actually processes RAW in iOS photos. I'll also add that in some ways, such as editing levels, the iPad and my phone seem faster than a MacBook Pro. Whether this boils down to specialized hardware, more efficient software or something else I do not know.

I'll also add that the older iPad Pro hardware often goes on fire sale, and may do so more often now.

Unfortunately all the windows and mac versions of Adobe applications are extremely slow and bloated. Using Draw on the first gen iPad Pro to draw a portrait or something works extremely well and then saving that and importing it onto Illustrator on the mac is a tragedy, for example.

But you still have to import it into Photos first, then jump to the app that you actually want to work in? I wish Apple would open up some of these APIs so that apps like Photoshop could actually interact with the filesystem.

There's a workaround (albeit somewhat annoying) to this: After you've imported your photos to the Photos app, select them all and then export them to your destination of choice on the Files app. Then you can open them with whatever app you need to (or import them straight to the app folder itself if possible).

Out of curiosity, what difference does that make? If you can still work with and access those photos from within the app, what difference does it make if they get imported into Photos first vs. a file system?

I think you're going to have to wait to get an answer on this. The hope is that you can use a standard USB-C card reader to quickly import directly into a Files directory.

I import raw pictures all the time, but it's usually just a few pics. I don't think people realize how long it takes to import a days worth of pics or how you lose all your file names when you import the pictures.

A lot of stuff is moving to HEIC as an intermediary high quality format between JPEG and RAW. Though that being said between this and Photoshop on the iPad I'd assume that they're looking to support large RAW files for just this use case. Creative graphical applications seems to be a sweet spot for this kind of device.

I'm not sure I understand why someone would get frustrated about it taking over an hour to transfer 250gb over USB 2.0. That's...math?

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