iPad Image Advisory

This week I bought an iPad, partly because I don't own, nor want to own, a laptop for remote work, but mostly because it's a cool tool for browsing the Web, music, and the obvious displaying photo galleries. That said, however, I also learned a lesson. If you sync your photo galleries on the iPad through iTunes, loading one or more folders, make sure you create at least one copy of all the folders before you sync them. I learned iTunes "optimizes" the images for the iPad, not in the iPad but on your computer, the very folders you transfer.

I used iTunes to transfer folders I have on photo.net, and while I haven't seen any gross diferences in the images, I have seen some small or subtle differences between the iPad ones and the pre-sync ones (fortunately have multiple copies of them on different HD's and on mobile me account). The iTunes also leaves an iPod cache of thumbnails in the folder. Just an advisory learned the hard way, my usual method.

And for what it's worth, the iPad specifications are 1024x768 at 132 ppi (pixels per inch). So if you size your images accordingly, or larger in size or resolution, you're fine, iTunes will reformat them in place and then transfer them to iPad. Otherwise, you'll get the differences I noted which are sizing up and blurring them, not what you need or want for presentation quality. Just another thing to do with images if you have an iPad.