Well every holiday seems to involve a series of compromises in relation to the technology required to take photos and blog. This time we’ve ditched the hacked Dell Mini running Mac OS X and external hard drive. We have replaced it with two iPads, a photo back-up (Sanho iPad Hyperdrive), wireless router (for fixed internet in hotel rooms). Don’t forget three cameras!!
Well for those contemplating this setup I can provide some advice. The iPads work wonderfully well. Flickr Stackr is a great App fro managing your Flickr account (You can’t use all of the Flickr online functions on iPad’s Safari), Photoshop Express is great for a quick crop, rotate and touch-up. I can not be so glowing about WordPress application for blogging, it seems to have unexplained problems uploading sometimes. I find Flickr’s blog to WordPress function the easiest way to get a photo onto the blog.
The biggest problem is that a typical holiday could involved 40gb of photos, no iPad can handle that. The largest available is 64gb and with Apps and Music that is cutting it fine. So here steps in the Sanho iPad Hyperdrive. It is a portable, battery powered hardrive. It pretends to be a camera card so it can upload photos to the iPad. It also offers incremental backups. Sounds great? It did, we bought one. It has, in my opinion, very flakey operating software. I have had to format the harddrive twice and it seems to have problems with incremental back-ups. In no way would I recommend it someone for a road-trip.
So what gives? Well Apple has made a great platform with the the iPad, but Apple either needs to release a larger iPad (128gb or 256gb would be nice) or it needs to offer a better way of having external storage. Until that time it is a bit of a hassle for a long-road trip. I also hope that the next version of iOS makes it easier to delete events or photo albums on the iPad, currently it seems you can only delete a photo at a time! Ickkk that could cause RSI!
Your on the road technical advisor!
Bromptoneering or bust 