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When will the
Apple iPod become a viable storage device for digital photography?
 The Apple iPod is a really cool device and many
photographers own one (for listening to music) but the device that
could be so perfect for photographers, is almost completely useless
when it comes to storing digital photography in the field.
Why is this so? I suspect it is because none of the people who are
involved in the iPod development process are serious enough
photographers (including the upper level management of Apple) to need a
real portable storage device. They have no use for storing images in
the field, a couple of flash cards takes care of that problem for them,
so they see that as a non-issue.
They are also probably too busy to go on long vacations so never
accumulate enough images to need a real storage device. To placate the
complainers they devised the stop-gap camera adapter for the iPod
Photo, but please notice that the iPod Photo no longer exists, the name
was dumped very quickly, probably due to the truckloads of complaints
about it not really being an iPod for photographers.
The camera adapter also supports only a small list of cameras and does
not support flash card readers. Serious photographers do not connect
their cameras directly to either computers or storage devices, they use
card readers.
To be fair to Apple, all the other portable storage devices (intended
for digital photography use) are also less than
spectacular. When you use the ones without viewing screens, you get a
really bad feeling in your stomach, that you are in actuality feeding a
black hole of some sort. Will the images ever come back? A lot of
photographers actually use these devices only to create a back-up file
and
do not erase their flash cards until they get home to their computer.
The portable storage devices with viewing screens are not much better.
None of them really support all the various RAW file formats (how can
they?). Just think about it for a moment, supporting all the RAW file
formats is a constant software development nightmare for Adobe and even
the specific camera manufacturers themselves have a hard time
supporting their own cameras with their own software.
Will Apple ever have a better iPod available for photographers?
Yes and
no. I am sure that they will come up with a better solution than they
have at present, but I also doubt that it will be good enough for
serious or
professional photographic requirements. To this day the only truly
dependable portable storage devices for serious digital photographers
are laptop computers, my personal choice of currently available
computers being the Apple Macbook and Apple MacBook Pro series.
My hope is that sometime soon Apple will come out with a very small
laptop (a wide 8-inch screen would be ok) that offers a large enough
hard disk drive for serious in the field photography storage. Sony has
been offering very small Vaio laptops for a number of years, so we know
it is possible.
dpmac digital lifestyle store
• digital cameras - computers - software - video games - music - book
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