Breaking Up with a Laptop on Vacation

My wife and I recently went to Orlando for a quick vacation.  I decided to try and live without my laptop for the trip since I recently got an iPad 3.

To be clear, I really only bring the laptop (a two-year-old MacBook Pro) to edit photographs I take with my SLR.

THE GOOD

My iPad 3 still has the old connector, and has 64GB of RAM, so it was very easy to get the RAW images from my camera into the iPad.  I even pulled in a high-def video about 10 minutes long.

This is maybe the most important "good":  The screen on the iPad 3 is astonishing.  The colors are extremely accurate and the resolution is truly better than my eyes can see, which can not be said for my laptop.  It was a lot easier to identify bad photos because the resolution of the screen made it easy to identify if the desired in-focus areas were truly in focus. 

I was able to do everything I wanted to do (eventually) and it didn't really seem to take more time than on a computer.  Some functions, like cropping and rotation, were easier and smoother on the iPad.

I was able to edit a movie using iMovie on the iPad before I posted it.  It could have been easier, but it was certainly usable.

Of course, the iPad took up much less space and weighed a lot less than the MacBook Pro.

THE BAD

iPhoto on the iPad is NOT the same as Aperture on the Mac (duh).  I was able to make 90% of the changes I wanted to make to my photographs, but I didn't feel like I was finished with them (I didn't mess with them at home later, so I guess I was finished after all!).

iPhoto and the camera roll use two different storage locations.  I had to "export" edited pictures to the camera roll to publish them, and this could only be done one picture at a time.  Fortunately I only wanted to post a few of the pictures, but this would be unacceptable on a photo vacation (see update).

There is no way to batch-edit photos for things like white balance.  This is maybe a good thing because it forces me to make sure the white balance is where I want it when I take the photo, instead of planning on fixing this in post (rember, white balance is just a setting in a RAW picture, so it's easy to change in post--unlike a JPEG, where white balance is part of the processing so you can't "undo" it if it is incorrect).

UPDATE

iPhoto for iOS has been updated to make it much easier to move multiple pictures between iPhoto and the camera roll. 

CONCLUSION

I will no longer bring my laptop on vacations to edit and publish photos.  SD cards are cheap, so I'll make sure I have enough cards to store all my pictures, using iPad as editor and backup.  I can transfer everything to the computer when I get home.