We recently celebrated our sons birthday with a big party, as with most events like this hundreds of images were taken and once collated I faced the daunting task of selecting a small percentage for a short slideshow.
I usually do this by rating images in Apple Aperture, first going through and giving anything worth a second look two stars, these I review and tidy up before rating them with three stars or higher if the image is ‘exceptional’.
At this point I like input from my wife, but sitting a Windows 7 user down in front of a Mac where the mouse is funny and maximise does not maximise things is more hassle than its worth. So I searched the iPad app store and found one of those perfect IPad apps – Pixelsync.
In short its a small app on your iPad and a helper application on your Mac which allows for projects in your Aperture library or iPhoto to be viewed, rated and flagged on your iPad. There does appear to be a restriction that like iTunes and the iPad or iPhone sync the library must be open in Aperture although Aperture does not need to be running at the time. It would be nice if this restriction could be resolved in both iTunes and Pixelsync but that is probably an Aperture restriction so outside of the control of the author of Pixelsync.
With the helper application on your Mac configured to open your library from the iPad you can select which projects within that Library will be synchronised to your iPad. Once synchronised you can rate and flag your images before synchronising back to Aperture.
The application works perfectly and my wife enjoyed rating the images while sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of tea far more than sitting in front of my Mac using a funny mouse.
I believe Pixelsync has been available for a while, and I meant to write this a while back. The appearance of Photosmith for the iPad which appears to be a similar app but for Adobe Lightroom reminded me to put finger to key and post this.
Pixelsync can be purchased on the app store and more information along with the helper application can be downloaded from http://www.pixelsyncapp.com/.
