(this article focuses on the iPad but is relevant to any portable device that can store photos)
If you are the proud owner of a shiny new iPad, you may have discovered that syncing high resolution photos to it in iTunes is slow, Very Slow.
Worse still, it seems to slow up all subsequent syncs, even if you haven't added any new photos.
If you only want a few hundred photos on your iPad you may not think this is a big deal, but once you start adding a few thousand of your treasured snaps it really starts to diminish the "fun factor" of your new toy.
So, what can be done about it, other than hope Apple optimises iTunes and the sync process in future?
The answer is to batch resize all your photos, which isn't as arduous a task as you might think, thanks to the excellent free imaging software, IrfanView.
First of all, I'll summarise what we want to do in real world terms, and then I'll explain how we achieve that in IrfanView.
What we want to do
The iPad screen resolution is 1024x768, which is 4:3 ratio. Any modern camera will take photos at far higher resolution than this, and some will use a different aspect ratio. We want to shrink our photos by the optimal amount so that they fill our iPad's screen (I don't like borders on my photo frame if it can be helped) but keep the filesize down to a minimum. This will speed up syncing, save space on the limited iPad storage and also take up less memory on the iPad when displaying the images. Note, iTunes does already attempt to do this, but there are enough people complaining online to make me think I am not the only person who is finding this inadequate.
How can we do this with as little effort as possible?
Well, honestly, there are many different tools you could use to do this, and some will be faster than my method. However, this article is I feel a good balance between speed and ease of use.
1) First of all, download, install and run IrfanView.
2) Click File->Batch Conversion / Rename and change the following settings:
- Choose "Batch Conversion"
- Change the "Look in" folder to your root picture folder. Nb. Change the list type to "details" rather than Thumbnails so it looks something like below.
- Tick the "User advanced options" box
- Change the "Output directory" to somewhere else on your computer. Nb. Ensure it has enough of space on it to store all your newly resized photos.
3) Click "Options" and set the following:
- Choose a JPEG image quality. I've gone for 80% which is a decent default. Tweak according to your space limitations.
- Tick "Keep original EXIF data". Some iPad apps may use this information so it's worth keeping.
- Same for IPTC, JPG-Comment and XMP. (unless you've written nasty things in your comments and want to keep them confined to your desktop of course!)
4) Close the Options window and Click the "Advanced" button on the "Batch Conversion" window, to the right of the "Use advanced options" checkbox, and set the following:
- "Resize" should be ticked
- Select "Set short side to" to 768. Nb. if you have a camera that takes images at 3:2 ratio like most SLR cameras, and viewing the entire image is more important to you than avoiding borders, you should select "Set long side to" to 1024 instead. Personally, I'd rather my 3:2 photos are slightly cropped at either side, and display full frame. You can always manually zoom out or scroll after all.
- Tick "Preserve aspect ration", "Use resample function" and "Don't enlarge smaller images." Nb. I haven't actually tried not using the resample function, but I figure the iPad cost a fortune, so I'd rather have the best quality I can get!
- Select "Create subfolders in destination folder." If you don't do this all your photos will be lumped into one giant album on your iPad.
- Select "Save files with original date/time". This isn't crucial but you may want to view photos chronologically on your iPad in future, so it's worth doing.
Finally, I'd recommend clicking "Save Settings" and creating a file called "Ipad Export.ini" somewhere for future use. Then, next time you can click "Load Settings" if needed to restore all of the above.
Click "OK" and we'll move onto step 5:
5) Now you need to select which folders you'd like to sync by "Control-clicking" each folder. Note there is some kind of bug with IrfanView which means that I couldn't get "Add All" to do what I wanted (or maybe I'm just being stupid) so I had to drag and drop my selected folders into the "Input Files" area of the window. Regardless of how you do it, check the file paths look correct in that window once you've chosen your folders.
6) Click "Start Batch" and wait. Make no mistake, this is going to take a fair bit of time even if you have a powerful computer. Your image files are likely to be big and IrfanView is resampling each one which is CPU intensive.
Once it has finished you should have loads of new folders, all containing images perfectly optimised for iPad. All you have to do now is point iTunes to the new folder and tell it to sync everything.
To add new photo folders in future, try and remember the most recent ones you've synced, order the "Look In" folder above in date order and just select your newer photos before repeating the process for the new folders only.
The only downside to this technique is of course that you won't be able to zoom into your photos to view them at the original resolution. Personally though, I have tens of thousands of photos I'd like to have on my iPad, and it's just not practical on this generation of hardware to store them all at full size.
So, what's the iPad like then?!
Well I'm not going to blog a full review as millions of people have already done that. I will say that as a photo viewer it is a beautiful, tactile way to reacquaint yourself with your photos though. The top-end iPad costs more than an Xbox 360, Wii, PS3 and laptop combined*, which is pretty obscene, and all of those can be used to view photos. The iPad is much more immediate though, so if that's important to you then it is a worthwhile luxury item.
It's also a very competent web browser, mail reader etc etc of course, but this article is about photos :-).
One negative point is that the bundled Photo Frame / Slideshow apps have the glaring oversight of only allowing a maximum interval between transitions of 20 seconds. This is far too quick for me, and I expect them to add some higher values in the next software update. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure 3rd party apps are available to display slower slideshows.
* This may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much!
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