Getting images onto the ipad

[3rdfoundation]

After a week of off and on fighting with the ipad to get images onto it I thought I'd provide some assistance.

I bought the ipad specific to view images and it has fought me tooth and nail. Apple is making this hard on purpose. They don't want you to be able to control your images organization. The information below will get you as close to control as you need.

Here are the rules of thumb you need to keep in mind:

1. You get one layer of folders/albums. This is obvious but it bears repeating. If you have lots of books of images keep in mind that volumes are better than chapters. Chapters will overwhelm you.

2. Albums are displayed in the order they were added. From that point forward, any image changes within an album will cause the album to move to the bottom. If you want to a new album to display prior to existing albums you need to do this:
a. add the new album (shows up at the bottom). Adjust one image in each album above it and they will move below it. This should be easy to do in a program. I have done it for a handful of albums by hand to prove it works.

3. Images sort by last modified date BUT that is not the only criteria. It will also sort by some mystical exif data. If you want your images in a specific order you must wipe all the exif data and set the last modified dates to match the alphabetical sort. I wrote a program to set the modified date. I think there is free code out there to do this somewhere.

4. The ipad likes to be finicky about images included. I've seen it drop anywhere from 1 to 30 images from 1 album. I am unsure if this is network or format related. To combat this I do 2 things:
a. pass them all through a format conversion process turning them into jpg. Even if they are already jpg I pass them thru.
b. load 1 album at a time and then check the image count.
I have an example below that uses imagemagick (mogrify) to reprocess my images. This works 99% of the time on image that would not otherwise load.

5. There is nothing you can do about image optimization. I've tried resizing them to fit 1024x768. No dice. They are still optimized. This means you must be a patient person because it is frick'n slow. I am still resizing them to fit within a bounding box of 1024 because this is where I will be viewing them.

If you have linux, this is the uber command to clean up images in directory:
mogrify -strip -resize '1024x1024' -format jpg *;rm *.png; rm *.PNG; rm *.gif; rm *.GIF; rm *.bmp; rm *.BMP

That command does 3 things for you:
1. gets rid of any pesky exif data that can screw up the sort
2. ensure the image is in a format the ipad likes
3. reduces the image size to hopefully speed up optimization a bit
The rm commands after the mogrify statement remove any original images after their conversion to jpg. otherwise you will be left with any original non-jpg images and the new jpg images.

This does not solve the image sorting issue. You need a script or program to set the last modified date to by in synch with the file name.

This should be all you need to get your images on the ipad under control. I hope it helps and saves you a ton of time and hair pulling.

Additional Notes:

EFFECTIVENESS OF MOGRIFY (imagemagick)
Using mogrify on images has worked on 10,000+ images except for one. Re-saving that image with the gimp (unix image editing tool) was not enough to get it to load. I renamed it and slightly cropped it. Then it took. I'm scratching my head at that a bit but overall mogrify does the trick.

FOLDER ORDER IS FINICKY
Folders do not always stay locked in position. 2 rules of thumb seem to apply:
1. renaming an image will not cause the folder to move
2. changing an image will cause the folder to move to the bottom. I think anytime a new photo is sync'd into a folder it is pushed to the bottom The ipad is "smart" enough to ignore name changes.

CAPACITY LIMITS
The capacity of the ipad in terms of images falls far short of its total capacity. This is a limit that I've learned the hard way. There are 2 issues here:
1. size of an image after it is processed by itunes. If you have a jpg that fits the size of the ipad (1024/768), expect the final image store by itunes to be 2x this size. This is because itunes stores 4 different versions/sizes of your image. This means that the true capacity of a 60GB ipad is 30GB for photos. But... you'll never reach that 30GB limit because of issue #2...
2. There is an upper limit to the number of images an ipad can manage in memory at once. I have found that the limit is about 4GB of jpgs (8GB used space on the ipad). In terms of images, I was able to load 24,615 images, totaling 8.5 GB space in the photo cache folder before itunes syncing would just sit forever. That was 124 albums.

 

[3rdfoundation]

capacity estimates

I wanted to add some additional insight into the capacity of a 60GB Ipad in relation to image albums. I've noticed something I didn't expect: The ipad's internal size of an image is approximately 2x the size of jpg.

STATED CAPACITY:
The capacity of a 60GB ipad is 59.17GB.

MY IMAGES:
I currently have 25 albums loaded. each album averages 230 images for a total of 5,755 images. These images are all jpgs sized to match the screen resolution of the ipad. The total space consumed on my file server is : 1.1 GB

IPAD IMAGES:
The iPad Photo Cache for these images contains : 5,808 items for a total 2.1 GB. In other words, 1.1 GB became 2.1 GB by the time the ipad finished processing them.

CAPACITY ESTIMATE:
Lets be a bit conservative and say the ipad has 58GB. If I do the math based on what I've seen it will be able to hold approximately 158,947 images. If all my images albums held 230 images, that is 690 image albums.

 

[kierandill]

You could use something like Stash, which lets you nest albums, sort by title, and many other things.

 

[3rdfoundation]

Thanks for the heads up on that app. I just got it and will run it through its paces.

 

[DUTCH VanAtlanta]

You could use something like Stash, which lets you nest albums, sort by title, and many other things.

Which one? Stash Pro or Media Stash?

 

[kierandill]

I got Pro, but I performed an experiment and it turns out that their idea of "Title" is not the same as filename (i.e. all show up as untitled - there is no way toe see the original filename). :/
I had imported files into it from photo album on the device. I will try the iTunes direct to app transfer next.

 

[kierandill]

I noticed an aberration in the order of an album and decided to look into it more. It came about because I found 2 adjacent pics in Photos whose image when viewed was rotated 90 degrees compared to the thumbnail. So I went to find them on the PC to fix them, but they did not appear in the same place when sorted by name in vista explorer as they do on the iDevices (pad or pod). So I added several columns to vista's explorer window and also used irfanview to look at the EXIF fields.
Using Windows terminology, here, the Explorer columns that fail to replicate the order seen on iDevices are:
Date modified, Date accessed, Date created, and Date last saved.
For the pictures in question and the ones seen immediately before and after them on the iDevice, the following 2 fields contain the exact same info for each picture(in Explorer):
Date taken and Date.
When examining the EXIF data for those pics, I should note that there are three date-related fields, all with the same info, which matches the 2 fields above. They are:
DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, and DateTimeDigitized.
So it is a little ambiguous as to which of those 3 EXIF fields maps to which of those 2 Windows Explorer columns, but those identical date colums are the only ones I can sort on in Windows and up with the same picture order as the iPod.
To me, this all smacks of iTunes trying to be some poor-man's iPhoto, ordering photos by by when they were taken (events) within an album or not, and not caring at all about the filenames, since as we know, all pictures come from digital cameras with naming systems that are unimportant, right?

So to the O.P., I guess I don't know where your term "last modified date" is coming from (linux?), since it does not appear in Vista or Win 7, and for the files I found out of order, the "Date modified" and "Date last saved" are not responsible.
Also, I wonder, if you wipe the EXIF and set that last modified the same on all the files, what does Photo do?

 

[3rdfoundation]

last modified date & exif data

Using windows (XP) explorer, I looked at the files I've changed the last-modified-date. The field is "Date Modified".

Setting this field is not enough. I've seen all sorts of weird sorting with only this change in place. You must wipe all exif data on the images as well. In my case I don't want exif data so it is no loss. I know imagemagick does this effectively with the -strip parameter. There is a binary distro of it here:
ImageMagick: Install from Binary Distribution

This is my code snippet for setting the modified data in java. I realize this is likely jibberish but the notion is that I have a list of files that are sorted by name. I then adjust the last modified date starting with 1/1/2000 and add 1 day for each file. This works like a champ. I can provide the entire method if anyone is interested. There isn't much to it. This is the core of the logic.

// DateTime = joda's date time class
// ComparablePair puts the file name and file together for easy sorting
DateTime currentDateTime = new DateTime(2000,1,1,0,0,0,0);
for (ComparablePair<String,File> pair : fileListSorted) {
File file2 = pair.getSecond();
file2.setLastModified(currentDateTime.getMillis());
currentDateTime = currentDateTime.plusDays(1);
}

 

[kierandill]

I used irfanview to strip all the exif data, and to my surprise, output files still had "date taken" in explorer. So I tried again, this time stripping XMP data as well (had to wikipedia that one) and this time that field was blank for all pics, and all 5 other date fields in explorer had the date/time stamp that the new file was written.
So deleted the iPhoto cache in itunes and resynced. I had barely time to look at the result before I had to pick up my daughter for the holidays, but I saw that the first 14 files on the pod in photo were not the same as the first 14 in explorer, then the coincided after that. I have to look at it some more though, because I have seen other apps that alpha sort differently when files have numbers or special characters in them.

 

[RAC]

The iPad could be so useful in photography but Apple seems to be determined to make it hard work.

I much prefer to organize images into folders myself.

At the moment I don't make much use of the iPad to store photos, just view them.

My images are stored on a Western Digital NAS. I use File Browser (on the iPad) to put them there, copying them from the SD card plugged into my WiFi printer, and organize them into folders. I like to keep jpg and raw files in separate sub directories for example.

FileBrowser actually makes quite a good photo viewer and has the option to copy images to the iPad "Film Roll" so that you can take a selection with you and view them in Photos.

While travelling, I am looking to use AirStash (possibly two of them) to back up photos from the camera's SD card and to view them of course. To make this work, AirStash needs to support something like WebDEV which I have been told is coming.

All of this effort would not be required if the iPad had an SD card slot (two would be even better) and an accessible file system & file manager.

 

[3rdfoundation]

Maximum number of images for the ipad

My ipad appears to have hit a brick wall for adding images. It has been sitting 'syncing my ipod' for several hours. If I do a talley of the files in the iPod Photo Cache I get this : 24,615 items, totalling 8.5 GB. (Per my earlier comments, that is actually about 4GB of jpg). It made it to 124 photo albums before locking up. It clocks on any attempt to adjust or remove albums. If I want my ipad to ever sync again I will likely have to start fresh with a new sync-image directory.

There appears to be an upper threshold to the total number of images the ipad can handle and it is way under the 60GB potential of the device. From what I've read, it has to do with the amount of thumbnails the OS can keep in its 256MB memory.

So... in other words, do not expect to be able to put more than 4GB of photos on an ipad.
The image capabilities of this device have been a series of disappointments. From a usable space perspective I have went from 60GB to 30GB (space consumed by the ipad = 2x jpg space) to a whopping 4GB of jpgs (memory limitations). And then there are all the flaming hoops I've jumped through to get the sorting of albums and images to be correct. Very lame.

I can try other routes (media stash) but I love the look of the built in photo viewer and wanted desperately for that to work. I guess I was asking for too much. If it didn't take so damn long to load images onto the device I'd find this limit workable. As it is, every time I want to work with a set of albums I will need to wipe the preceding set and load the new set, which will likely take 1/2 to a full day.

This discussion thread goes a bit into it:
Apple - Support - Discussions - Is there a maximum number of pics that ...

 

[peled]

Why do you need to sync the pictures.
Why not just copy them all to the LIB and from the lib to the Device.
That's what I do with books, magazines, and songs

 

[accordlayingkit]

So how do u copy stuff to liabary? Sorry new to ipad

 

[iVan]

The iPad could be so useful in photography but Apple seems to be determined to make it hard work.

I much prefer to organize images into folders myself.

At the moment I don't make much use of the iPad to store photos, just view them.

My images are stored on a Western Digital NAS. I use File Browser (on the iPad) to put them there, copying them from the SD card plugged into my WiFi printer, and organize them into folders. I like to keep jpg and raw files in separate sub directories for example.

FileBrowser actually makes quite a good photo viewer and has the option to copy images to the iPad "Film Roll" so that you can take a selection with you and view them in Photos.

While travelling, I am looking to use AirStash (possibly two of them) to back up photos from the camera's SD card and to view them of course. To make this work, AirStash needs to support something like WebDEV which I have been told is coming.

All of this effort would not be required if the iPad had an SD card slot (two would be even better) and an accessible file system & file manager.

+1000. We see eye to eye on this. This is such a great way to use my media!

I also use the NAS with AppleTV. When I open iTunes there is a link there to the music on the NAS (Network Attached Storage). With AirPlay, compatible speakers around the house and an iPad with Apple's Remote App, a NAS offers a treasure trove of possibilities...

Something else you should look into if you want to manage pictures while traveling is an Internet capable camera.
http://www.samsung.com/ca/consumer/.../EC-ST1000BPUCA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail
It allows you to upload pictures as you take them to a site of your own choosing. If you already have an account such as Photobucket, this camera will send the pictures there. If you want to one up on this, get a Habilis email address that will bring your pictures directly to your Dropbox address...

I want to try all this but I just bought a new camera and I don't travel much but the next thing I try is an Internet Capable camera.

 

[iVan]

My ipad appears to have hit a brick wall for adding images. It has been sitting 'syncing my ipod' for several hours. If I do a talley of the files in the iPod Photo Cache I get this : 24,615 items, totalling 8.5 GB. (Per my earlier comments, that is actually about 4GB of jpg). It made it to 124 photo albums before locking up. It clocks on any attempt to adjust or remove albums. If I want my ipad to ever sync again I will likely have to start fresh with a new sync-image directory.

There appears to be an upper threshold to the total number of images the ipad can handle and it is way under the 60GB potential of the device. From what I've read, it has to do with the amount of thumbnails the OS can keep in its 256MB memory.

So... in other words, do not expect to be able to put more than 4GB of photos on an ipad.
The image capabilities of this device have been a series of disappointments. From a usable space perspective I have went from 60GB to 30GB (space consumed by the ipad = 2x jpg space) to a whopping 4GB of jpgs (memory limitations). And then there are all the flaming hoops I've jumped through to get the sorting of albums and images to be correct. Very lame.

I can try other routes (media stash) but I love the look of the built in photo viewer and wanted desperately for that to work. I guess I was asking for too much. If it didn't take so damn long to load images onto the device I'd find this limit workable. As it is, every time I want to work with a set of albums I will need to wipe the preceding set and load the new set, which will likely take 1/2 to a full day.

This discussion thread goes a bit into it:
Apple - Support - Discussions - Is there a maximum number of pics that ...

Try FileBrowser, you'll love it!