You could import, rate, and organise photos on your iPad and sync them all to Lightroom when you got back to your computer. Wirelessly. With support for star ratings, color labels and Collections, Photosmith let photographers start their workflow on the go, whether they were in the middle of a paid shoot or waiting in an airport lobby on the way back from vacation, with hundreds of photos to sort through.

With the iPad’s brilliant screen, battery life, and touch interface, Photosmith helped photographers finish their chores before they even got back to their computer.

Photosmith 2 brought two-way syncing, so you could send photos from Lightroom to your iPad, a sensational interface with support for Lightroom keywords and the brand-new Smart Groups, making it easier and more intuitive to gather just the photos you need for sharing, organizing or keywording.

All that, and a bevy of new features and functions to support even more workflows – because that’s what Photosmith is about. Enabling photographers to plug the convenience and mobility of the iPad into their workflow, however streamlined or complex it may be.

We realized, however, that the iPad’s built-in photo management software was never designed for the kind of heavy lifting that photographers require.

So the majority of the work we put into the next release was under the hood, where it was needed most. Our customers need more speed, stability and flexibility. Just like Apple did with the Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion versions of Mac OS X, the next version of Photosmith would focus on the engine.

Not just tuning it, though. We built a whole new one, and that engine is the heart of Photosmith 3.

It’s faster, stronger, more stable, enabling Photosmith to support larger images, even on older devices.

After months of engineering, it’s time to take the wraps off.

New Import Screen

Enter the Sandbox: more control over your photos.

In iOS terminology, a ‘sandbox’ is an app’s internal storage space. The biggest change in Photosmith’s handling of photos is that they are now stored in a dedicated storage space when you import them into Photosmith, where they can be better safeguarded and managed.

For instance, you can now delete photos if you really don’t need them and don’t want to sync them to Lightroom. You can also delete photos you’ve synced from Lightroom with the Photosmith plugin, though they’ll only be deleted from Photosmith: by design, your Lightroom library will not be altered.

This change yields the greatest advance in speed and stability. The iPad’s native photo management APIs often buckled under the strain of large numbers of high-resolution photos in JPEG and Camera Raw, and while Photosmith’s previous releases became better and better at patching pre-empting or compensating failures in the OS, the new engine sidesteps these issues entirely.

Plug in or cut the cable.

Because the new sandboxed system offers greater control and security, even for large volumes of photos, Photosmith 3 supports new ways to bring photos onto your iPad, or to download them to your computer.

If you have a wi-fi grip for your camera, like Canon’s WFT-E4, you can send photos – wirelessly – to Photosmith via FTP. These transfers are often faster even than Eye-Fi cards, so you can ensure you have backups of your photos while you take them, and show them off on your iPad immediately.

And since the photos are stores in Photosmith’s sandbox, any shots that don’t make the grade can be deleted, so only the keepers get synced to Lightroom.

FTP also works for sending photos from a computer, of course.  Photosmith can act as an FTP server. You can choose whether you want Photosmith to accept JPEGs, Camera Raw files or both, and for extra security, you can change the port and set a password, so only you have access.

If you prefer, you can download your photos via iTunes File Transfer – and this works both ways: you download photos from your iPad with iTunes. Including XMP sidecar files. So if there’s no wi-fi available to sync with Lightroom, you can still download them to your computer and manually import them to Lightroom, with all your metadata intact.

Lightroom sync, Eye-Fi, FTP and iTunes, wireless and over USB. However you want to get your photos off or onto your iPad, Photosmith will work for you.

Share and enjoy.

Photosmith can already send photos to Flick, Facebook, Dropbox, or via e-mail. Smart Groups and star ratings enable you to quickly grab the photos you want to share. We thought we could take it a step further.

Photosmtih 3 also makes it easier to share photos with other apps on your iPad. The new PhotoCopy protocol, based on FileXchange, lets the popular Eye-Fi capturing app Shuttersnitch and Photosmith share images directly.

Photosmith is in the first wave of apps that have the protocol integrated. As more and more photo apps are including PhotoCopy support in their updates, Photosmith is ready to support round-trip operations, where you can PhotoCopy a picture to an editing app to apply filters or tweak the color balance, and send the result back to Photosmith. Keeping the original intact, of course.

Cooperation with other app developers is essential to Photosmith’s mission: providing you with the tools, functions and flexibility to work how you want to work.

Tweaks and fixes.

As always, we listen to your feedback and work hard to fix any problems and fine-tune the app’s interface to make it better and easier to use. Our customers are photographers, and we’re committed to giving them the tools to support their workflow, and work how they want to work.

By taking the time to rebuild the very foundations, the technology at the heart of Photosmith, we’ve been able to sidestep issues with the built-in photo management systems that had already taken us months of engineering work to fix. And getting rid of those workarounds makes Photosmith 3 faster, leaner and more stable, so larger photos can now be displayed.

And even if unforeseen issue do occur (the universe is an imperfect place, after all) you can tap the alert to find helpful information on what you can do next.

Nearly here.

The release is just around the corner. Seven months of intense work are coming to fruition, and we can’t wait to share the results with you. With its new engine, Photosmith 3 is all about speed, stability and flexibility.

And of course, it’s a free upgrade for all owners of Photosmith.

Beta testing is well underway and we’ve been getting fantastic, useful feedback.

Stay tuned, because Photosmith 3 is coming.

A few minutes ago, the results of seven months of effort was given to our team of beta testers – As we said previously, unlike previous development cycles, we’re treating this beta more as a Release Candidate in terms of quality, shine and polish.  This is a feature complete beta, and all major known issues have been addressed.  We’re excited to see if our dedicated team of testers can break it!

We have maintained an open and honest accounting of our development path and challenges along the way, and will continue that as we update everyone with the results of the beta testing over the coming days.

Our release timeline is still based on when the app is ready, and not the calendar; we will know more based on feedback from our testing team.

Well, we’re finally there! At last we’re ready to officially start the beta program!  But fear not, this doesn’t mean we are still a long way away from release (we hope) like in past cycles…

In the past we started betas too early and wasted our tester’s time with crap builds and thus didn’t get very good test coverage at the end when we really needed it. So we resolved to do better this time:

So what we’re doing differently this time is wait until we are 99.5% there to start the beta. We think this build is really close to being an actual release candidate.

So… we are asking you, dear readers, for 10 volunteers to help us really work the app over hard and smash it to bits to make sure it’s really as solid as we think it is..  To be clear, this isn’t a chance to play with new goodies for free like our Adobe brethren are able to do. No, we are asking for volunteers dedicated to helping make sure this app works no matter how crazy your workflow is.

Your contributions will decide if tens of thousands of photographers the world over will keep or lose their most precious pictures.  This is not an assignment for the flippant…

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to:

1. Jump through the hoops Apple makes us go through to enroll iPad test devices (TestFlight makes this as easy as possible but it’s still a bit of a hassle)
2. Import, Export, and Sync your precious pictures with Photosmith and test and verify 1,000,000% that everything worked perfectly
3. Delete them and test again
4. Repeat #2 & 3 a few more times
5. Report back to us detailed testing results. (How many files you tested, how you verified the files, any problems encountered, etc.)

To be blunt: this is testing that will require a fastidious nature. If you’ve ever muttered the phrase “good enough for government work” this probably isn’t the job for you.

Final requirements:

• Apple places a strict limit on the total number of devices we can register for testing. This limit only resets once per year so we have to be very picky about who we choose.  Unfortunately, we can’t just take the approach of letting 10,000 folks test and hope we covered it all. Besides, managing that many people is impractical.  So, we’re looking for about 10 folks.
• A hallmark of this release is it’s flexibility with different workflows. Preference will be given to folks that can test the esoteric stuff (WiFi grips, Eye-Fi, FTP upload, etc.) as well as the traditional Shoot>Download>Import>Tag>Sync or Lightroom>Sync>Tag>Sync workflows
• The deadline for volunteering is midnight EDT, 28-April, that’s this Sunday.

What’s in it for you?

First and foremost, you’ll have our eternal gratitude.  This is one of those things that we just can’t do properly without community help. Second, if you don’t already have Photosmith we’ll give you a free copy.  Third, you’ll have the thanks and praise of everyone else too. Finally, we’ll thank you publicly as a friend and contributor to Photosmith (optional, if you’re the shy type).

Signup here: Please tell us why you would be a good tester, any previous experience you have with testing, what model iPad you have, what cameras you shoot with, what operating system you run, Lightroom version, and about how many hours you think you can volunteer to testing.

Signup is closed. We are now sorting through the applications and narrowing our selections to a manageable few. Thank you so much for the all of the enthusiastic help!

So what exactly is taking so much time? For those interested in the details, I’ll hit on a few points that have been unexpected time sinks.

Image Orientation

Rotate an image clockwise or counterclockwise. Easy stuff, right? Right? One would think. And, as always, the devil is in the details. And we’re not the first developers to hit the orientation trap. See this page for an interesting read on how most services can’t handle various embedded image orientations.

Yes, the image orientation (rotation) is contained in the image’s EXIF, set by the camera when the picture was taken. But keep in mind that there’s typically a thumbnail image, usually a full-resolution jpg, sometimes a medium-sized jpg, and the raw data, each with their own orientation. Each needs to be calculated separately so the GPU can rotate based on the image that’s being displayed.

Now add in the user’s custom rotation for when they want to modify the orientation – we now have 3 (thumbnail, screensize, full res), plus a user orientation modifier.

But for more fun, it turns out that Apple doesn’t quite follow the norm with EXIF orientation. It took some time to realize that Apple’s implementation, albeit unconventional, was valid. Given that this is  an iPad app, we can’t just ignore iOS-generated images.

And to make things more fun, Lightroom exports images without an orientation. But only if the plugin doesn’t use the previews database…

All of a sudden, there’s about two dozen different combinations of orientations that have to be handled in different ways. We claim to be a photo management app, so we have no choice other than to make it right. And that burned up several weeks of two developers’ time.

But… it’s finally all working. The torture set linked above now completely works in Photosmith:

RAW+JPG Support

The current version of Photosmith supports RAW+JPG, and because of some technical details, we can’t easily support all formats (DNG, for example), so RAW+JPG remains the only viable way to support those formats. This version of Photosmith is being completely revamped so that all images are handled within the app, rather than pointing back to Photos app. And while RAW+JPG was one of the items on our list, it took about two weeks of work to bring the app back up to support it everywhere (import, image extraction, display, export, sync) and thoroughly test the changes.

It now works as before – if we can’t extract everything we need from the raw file and there’s an associated jpg, then we get what we can from the jpg. It’s just now, the files sit in our own repository.

Nothing complex about this one – just a lot of small rework items spread throughout the app to get things working right.

Transferring Photos from Link to Copy

If you’ve been following our blog posts, you’ll know that the upcoming app will be able to either Copy the pictures directly into the app, for full control under Photosmith, or Link them back to Photos.app. In fact, here’s a screenshot of the import process:

However, during testing, we found a hole in the workflow: what happens if you link a picture from Photos.app, apply a bunch of metadata updates, and then decide you want to move it into Photosmith and clear out your Photos.app? Without some kind of transfer method, you’d essentially have to remove the linked references (and thus your metadata), and then run the import process again to Copy the images in. That would just plain suck for workflow management – badly enough that we created a new dialog to allow users to do exactly this – transfer linked images from Photos.app into Photosmith without losing their existing data. Design, coding, testing, and refining all combined to take several weeks for that one too.

Remaining Items

All new development items have been completed at this point – we’re working on bugs and cleaning up some things throughout the app: Collection image counts that don’t update from a background import. You can’t change a selected album in the import dialog after making a selection / deselection. Facebook re-upload isn’t working right. Delete dialog sometimes hangs when it’s done. And about a dozen others of those kinds of items.

We’ve been doing a lot of in-house testing as we go, so we’re pretty confident that it’s getting close.

OK, dammit – when will you ship?

When it’s ready. And not a moment sooner.

Believe us when we say that we want it out to you guys as quickly as possible – we’ve spent the past 7 months’ worth of nights and weekends designing/coding/testing, and are eager to see it complete as well. But we’re committed to making it right, from beginning to end. (And we really appreciate of all those who understand this!)

Details matter. It’s worth waiting to get it right – Steve Jobs

What we can talk about is some of the newest features that will be introduced with v2.3. Almost all of these are things we’ve wanted to do, but due to “ahem”… protections… put in place by the Photos app, have been unable to do so. They’ve been long requested, and our hands have been tied… until now

Syncing deleted/removed pictures

This one has come up a LOT. And for good reason- it directly affects people’s workflow. The situation is simple: remove a picture from a Lightroom published collection, sync, and it’d show up again. Or remove it from the Photos.app, sync, and it’d be transferred again. Both sides of the sync saw the list of images and decided that, because it wasn’t there, it needed to be transferred, and so the sync did it’s thing. The problem is… this logic wasn’t always right.

Now that we have more control over the images and we know when they’re either removed from a collection or deleted altogether, we can update sync so that it properly handles the situation. Starting in v2.3, the following logic is applied:

• If you remove an image from a Lightroom published collection (or delete the image from your LR catalog), sync will remove the same image from the corresponding Photosmith collections upon sync
• If you remove an image from Photosmith (or delete if it resides in Photosmith), sync will remove the reference in Lightroom’s published collections.
• Sync will never Delete (that is, permanently remove) an image from your Lightroom catalog.

We have a policy to preserve images as much as possible, and that includes not deleting them from your Lightroom catalog. It’s too dangerous, so we’ve made a conscious decision to avoid that one. If you want to delete photos from your Lightroom catalog just mark them with a star, label, or keyword that means something to you and then use Lightroom’s normal menu options to accomplish it.

Syncing updated images from Lightroom

Another big request.

Let’s say you sync over 100 images from Lightroom to Photosmith. Tag, rate, etc. No big deal. But what if you *edit* the picture in LR (such as change the exposure, white balance, cropping, etc)? In the currently shipping version, we’re not allowed to update images in Photos.app / Camera Roll (again…. for your “protection”).

Starting in v2.3, if you update an image(1) in LR and perform a sync against that image (either in a published collection or via an Export to Photosmith), then the updated image itself will replace the existing one on Photosmith. This gets into some weird logic if you have original raw files in Photosmith; only the previews are updated – your original raw data is always untouched.

Footnote 1: Except for rotations. Inexplicably, the Lightroom plugin API is missing the ability to apply rotations so those sync from LR to Photosmith but can’t go back to Lightroom.

Background sync

Everytime you do a sync in the current version, a little dialog pops up during the sync to show you the progress. But you’re blocked out of using the app while this happens. This was an unfortunate consequence of Photos.app and how it deals with threading and memory. If we tried to access Photos.app while a sync was in progress, it’d eventually crash the app. The spinner was the only workaround to the problem – it showed the progress while blocking access to the app during sync.

We don’t have those restrictions anymore, so starting in v2.3, LR sync will happen as a background task – you’ll see it in the Activity Center like you do any export action. And you can continue to use the app while a sync is in progress!

Another bonus is that you can continue to sync with Lightroom even if you app-switch out of Photosmith and into another app. For example, you can go catch up on your email while a sync is in progress. However, there is a 10 minute timeout that is imposed on every app by iOS, so you get a warning after 9 minutes to return to Photosmith if a sync is still in progress.

Oh yes, you now also have the option to receive images via FTP or Eye-Fi while Photosmith is in the background. The same 10 minute limit applies.

USB Access

Before you get too excited – no you can’t sync over USB. We’ve looked and looked for solutions on this, and while it’s within the realm of possibility, it’s just too difficult to implement and support long term.

However… what we have done is open up Photosmith’s Photos repository to iTunes, so you can use iTunes to find the Photosmith app, show the “documents”, and find your entire Photos repository available for download.

In a worst-case scenario, if you have to get your pictures out of Photosmith and your iPad is locked, frozen, apps aren’t responding, etc, etc, then you should still be able to get your images off. Unfortunately, you can only download the entire repository, but that’s still 1000x better than no access.

What’s left

As I touched on above, the items left to develop are mostly contingency items (ie- your previews become corrupt or weren’t restored in a iPad restore), minor quirks, updated graphics, and some other bits and pieces here and there.

We can’t give a launch date – remember we still have day jobs, so all we can do is work as quickly as possible to get things out. We’re sending what is hopefully our last mid-development release (Alpha 4) out this week to our internal team, and then planning our Beta out to a much larger audience in a week or two. Assuming all goes well, it’ll be sent to Apple and in the hands of users a week or two after that.

Update on “Sandboxing” 

We’ve talked about this extensively in the past so if this is the first you’ve heard of it you may want to peruse those old posts.  This time around I’m going to talk about what the changes actually are and what some of the benefits and drawbacks of them are.

In a nutshell: all previous versions of Photosmith accessed your photos directly via the Photos app (via the ALAssets API) each and every time you looked at one. Starting in this version we’re making a local copy of the photo and accessing it directly off of disk without all the extra layers in between.  The benefits are we can do most things faster, use less memory, and some things are now possible that weren’t before. The drawback is we now have to do for ourselves some things that Apple gave us for free; imports take a little more time, and it uses more disk space –which is already a precious resource on an iPad.

First order of business, Import.  If we’re going to change the model from automatically importing everything to giving you control over what gets imported then we have to give you a way to do that. So we need to add a whole new import process. That means changing our database to support it, making a great UI to help you select images (Hello Smart Groups!), and least fun but most import, write our own image processing and metadata extraction code. Previously we got that from Apple but that goes away now so add it to the todo list. Heh, deciphering a dozen different RAW file formats and the umpteen different ways manufacturers interpret the same EXIF spec should be no sweat, right? Right?! Luckily, we’ve got Oliver, a new developer on our team. That man is amazing, he took over our existing processing code and polished it into pure gold over the last few months so hopefully we’ve got this one about licked.  Next month, we might even let him email his family, once.

Notice the “link” and “copy” buttons?  How your photos are imported into Photosmith is up to you: Copy the full photo from the Camera Roll into Photosmith’s and have peace of mind that it’s safe, and you have full control over deletion of the image, right from within Photosmith.  Otherwise, if you’re a little tight on storage space on your iPad, you may leave the original photos in the Camera Roll and we’ll only render some small previews for quick display purposes only.  However,  you run the risk of Bad Times if you accidentally purge the Camera Roll and don’t sync to Lightroom first.  For this reason, Copy is the default, and is highly suggested.

Our Sandbox, Our Rules – Let There Be Delete!

So, what will all this effort buy us?

• Stability - Mike said the first Alpha release of v2.3 was the most stable version he’s ever used (keep in mind, Mike is the keeper of all the “crasher” images that customers send us) and it’s been getting better from there.  It’s been a long road and we’re very excited about where we’re at now.
  
• Speed – you won’t believe how fast and responsive the app is getting in the latest builds – most notably, the loupe / full screens can take advantage of those local previews and load so much faster.
• Efficiency – it’s too early to say for certain, but we think we’re going to be able to do 100% zoom with images sizes that will shock you, even on iPad 1 devices…
• Future Flexibility – With all the changes in v2.3, we changed a lot of how we store data in our internal database.  While making these necessary changes, we planned for the future as much as possible.  Photosmith is now flexible enough to handle many different sources and destinations.  Read into this what you want – this next update is just the beginning.  :)
• Additional Integration - Now that we’ve freed ourselves from the bonds of the Camera Roll, we’ve been able to add FTP server support (upload/download directly to/from the app) and iTunes support (download your pictures or xmp files directly through iTunes)

Recent Feedback

And on the other hand…

• Website – We started with the website redesign almost immediately after 2.0 launched, but it took this long to catch up.  We love the new look Nico created and Shawn implemented.  Once the app update is live, our plan is to backfill the website with more demo videos and example workflows.
• Seagate – We started working on the Wireless Plus drives back in August. By staying involved with Seagate over the months we got the opportunity to give them suggestions of the things that we think are necessary to interoperate with Photosmith. It looks like most of them made it into the final build.  Note: we haven’t run our own final certification tests yet so it’s too soon to promise, but we think their new drive will deliver the external storage we’ve all been waiting for.
• RAW Image Formats – As mentioned above, we’ve been adding our own RAW image handling. For now, we’re focusing exclusively on metadata and embedded jpg extraction. When time allows, our plan is to expand our own image rendering capabilities beyond what’s otherwise available via Apple’s code in iOS.
• Wifi grips & FTP – A nice side effect of adding the FTP server is that we now can support many WiFi grips and import directly from the camera into Photosmith.   This will open up Photosmith to popular Wi-Fi-enabled dSLR grips! (Sadly, Canon’s new 6D does not appear to support FTP but instead uses a different protocol. No idea yet if we’ll be able to add that or not).
• Integration with other photo apps – Good things in good time – Let’s just say that iOS developers are some of the coolest folks out there, and we’re very proud to have a very productive working relationships with other Photography app developers.  We all see the greater good, and the users will benefit to “collaborative competition.”
• Standard Boring Business Stuff - Taxes, payroll, server maintenance, it’s all comes with the territory.

But it was not to be – after a round of testing with users, we decided to pull support at the last minute. We just couldn’t make things work like expected. We were able to get in touch with Seagate, signed some paperwork, and started talking to the drive’s engineers. In short, the hardware itself was designed for data consumption, not data creation. Seagate intended the drive to be used primarily as a media device, where you could load up videos or pictures and then look at them while on the go. An internal indexing process scans the drive upon startup, cataloging all the files on disk; files added to the drive after it was running wouldn’t show up until the index process ran again. For a data-critical backup device, this just wasn’t acceptable. Photosmith needs to be sure that when your images and XMP files are saved to the drive that they’re actually there; a backup device is only good if you can read back the data. We tried several work arounds, including even delaying the verification until the drive had rebooted, but still couldn’t produce reliable results. So… we had no choice but to pull support within the app.

Fast forward a few months. Seagate is already working on the next iteration of their wireless drive. Completely new hardware. Completely new firmware. And a chance to change things so that we can reliably upload to the drive. Seagate graciously included us in some of the design and features of the drive. We also were able to get a pre-production drive to start testing and developing against, and did so through November and December.

Why didn’t we say anything until now? We have a non-disclosure agreement with Seagate. It’s the condition of having pre-release knowledge and input. Seagate announced their new drive, the Seagate Wireless Plus at CES a couple weeks ago, and the drives are hitting shelves now.

OK – so what about my original GoFlex drive?

Well, there’s really no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: we won’t be able to provide support for the original GoFlex drive. The internal design simply won’t accommodate Photosmith’s needs, and we’re not going to release support for the drive if it doesn’t provide what you need.

We understand that there will be some unhappy users who bought the GoFlex drive for this reason, and we’re sympathetic – heck, we bought several for testing and personal use. If you’d like, you can talk to Seagate about the situation by contacting them here.

Enough already! What’s the plan?

I’m glad you asked. We finished up development of the new Wireless Plus drive in December. Everything works well, and we’ve added some additional options, such as byte-by-byte read back verification and uploading / updating XMP files. There’s only one problem – up until now, we’ve only had one drive to test against. And we’re not about to release this into the wild with a sample test size of one.

However, if you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we’re currently in the middle of a really big update to the app. An update that is proving to be the best thing we’ve ever done with regards to stability and performance. Given the feedback from many, many users, stability and performance are our top priority right now, so the Wireless Plus testing and support will need to wait until the next release. However, given that it’s working here on my desk, I’m 99% confident that we can deliver on it “very soon”.

I don’t want to leave you with empty promises, so here’s a screenshot of the development version of the app (note the new Import Photos button and rearranged menus). This is all live and working – no smoke and mirrors:

The plan is to get v2.3 with the updated architecture out the door as soon as possible, and then we’ll focus on getting the new drive fully tested and out as well.

by Mike Wren

Shhh… don’t tell anyone, but while the Chris’ and Nico are busy working on the forthcoming Photosmith app update, v2.3, I thought I’d give everyone a quick update – a peek behind the curtain – as to what we’ve been up to.  I’m too excited to keep this under wraps.

As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, the focus of the forthcoming v2.3 app update is, in a word: STABILITY.  While the v2-series of Photosmith works as expected for most users, there are certain workflow scenarios where the experience of using the app and sync with Lightroom has been… shall we say… less than desirable.  This is not acceptable to us, and we’ve taken the extraordinary step of reevaluating our entire methodology.

I’m very happy to report that after 12 weeks of coding, recoding, and a little bit of internal testing – the new version of Photosmith is already more stable than the current public version.  The Chris’ have warned me about managing expectations, but they seriously knocked it out of the park with this update.  It’s all because we’ve completely moved away from using the Camera Roll for photo storage.

We learned an important lesson in 2012 – The architecture behind Photos.app and Camera Roll simply wasn’t engineered for the kind of use (and abuse) we threw at it.  However, it was the Apple-recommended way to do things, and we complied.  We were never thrilled with the compromises necessary.  Inability to modify or delete photos in Camera Roll via our app, the muddying up of Photo Stream, and eventually the inability to mitigate and handle the quirks/instability of Camera Roll made it obvious that we needed to find a better way to store photos.  This would require a Herculean effort to update our code – an effort measured in months, not days or weeks.

Speaking on behalf of the team, I’m comfortable saying that our new no-compromises approach will mean Photosmith v2.3 will be the app we all want… and expect.

Let’s get down to the “when” and the “what.”

When?

I’ll be completely candid – we don’t have a specific target date.  The Photosmith v2.3 update will be ready when it’s done.  We’re not taking it out of the oven until it’s ready.  We’ve been burned in the past by discussing ballpark best-guess estimates; it’s not something we’d like to repeat.  I’ll only say this: Our timeline is no longer measured in months.

What?

Beyond app and Lightroom sync stability, we’ve taken the opportunity to add in a few new often requested features while making the move from Camera Roll.  These are features aimed at making Photosmith more useful for the mobile photographer.  There is some *really* exciting hardware interoperability we’re still working on, the details of which will be announced in the coming weeks.

There’s a new import photos dialog within Photosmith, used when ingesting/importing photos from Camera Roll.  This is necessary for everyone using a Camera Connection Kit (CCK) to get photos onto their iPad.  Apple locks all third-party developers from accessing the dock connector – you must import into Photos.app.  From there, we will either import the full camera raw or JPG file, or link a small reference version of the photo into Photosmith.  The specifics of all this will be covered in detail in our online documentation and Knowledge Base prior to release of v2.3.

For users with Eye-Fi cards, you will continue to be able to import from Eye-Fi directly into Photosmith, completely bypassing the Camera Roll.

But… I’ve saved the best for last: We’re working on background syncing with Lightroom – Continuing to work in Photosmith while syncing with your Lightroom catalog is a real game-changer.  Wireless import of photos will occur in the background, as well.  This is a big deal, and makes working in Photosmith that much more quick and efficient.

There’s more, which we’ll announce in the coming weeks, here on our blog, our Facebook page at facebook.com/photosmith (you *have* liked us there, right?) and over on the Twitters @photosmithapp .

If you have any questions, issues or ideas, please check out our support area over at http://support.photosmithapp.com – we’ve tried to compile as much information there as possible, and more Knowledge Base articles and FAQ’s are being added daily.  Yes, an all-encompassing user manual is still forthcoming – no, seriously.  Stop laughing, it on my to-do list!

Mike Wren joined Team Photosmith ten months ago as an enthusiastic beta tester prior to the v2.0 release.  He now advises the Chris’ and Nico on usability, workflow and general photographic geekery, while writing Knowledge Base articles and avoiding writing a full-fledged user manual.  He’s also been known to also help out with the user support queue.

An event and lifestyle photographer by day, Mike lives in Albany, NY with his wife, two kids, and collection of unframed Phish posters.  This is his first post to the Photosmith Blog.

We have our own car here within the Photosmith development effort. For two years now, we’ve been using the model as recommended by Apple for centralized iPad picture storage – the built in Photos.app. The underlying library that gives access to the Photos.app is referred to as ALAssets. And while doing this certainly has its advantages for the workflow (namely, one place for your images), it has caused more problems that can even be described in one blog post. The technical shortcomings, oversights, and pitfalls within this library have translated into inordinate amounts of time and effort in development – we’ve had to work around problems that just shouldn’t exist. We’ve submitted multiple bugs and feature requests to Apple, but the problems persist. And, to top all this off, the ALAssets library alone has the biggest effect on the stability of the app. While we can work around some of the problems, we’re finding ourselves left on the side of the road too many times. The time has come to trade in the car.

And that’s exactly what we’re working on – replacing the link-to-Photos.app with an import process. Changing foundational architecture is always painful, but this is a move that is long overdue. We’ve had a couple reported bugs as well, and will be addressing those with the new development effort.

New Import Process

That’s right – we’re revamping the import process. In fact, we’re completely re-working the entire structure of how Photosmith keeps track of images. Going forward, Photosmith will have an actual “Import” dialog, where you can select which pictures you want to pull into the Photosmith sandbox. Once they’re imported, you can do everything you can currently, without the random crashes we’re getting from ALAssets rearing its ugly head. No more waiting for the app to sync on startup every time.

Moving to this model also allows us to re-work the Lightroom sync process. Now the previews will be loaded within the sandbox, and not to the Camera Roll. And if you have an iPad 2/3/4/mini, you’ll be able to import from Lightroom or Eye-Fi and still use the app at the same time (the current popup during sync is a limitation as a result of ALAssets quirks); an iPad 1 doesn’t have the resources to handle the sync and the tagging /viewing of large images at the same time. Also- we’ve been able to re-work sync so that it’s faster, too.

And since we won’t be relying on ALAssets for the images, images will load quicker. Histograms will faster. No more “metadata not yet loaded”.

Preliminary tests are promising. We’ve been able to do 5,000 and 10,000 image syncs from Lightroom, averaging 4 seconds per image upload (about 2x as fast as the current version). The Import dialog is being worked on, and we’ll be able to start processing imports from Photos.app in the next couple days.

And in the event that Apple decides to give developers the ability to download images directly from the camera through the Camera Connection Kit, we’re ready to support that. (Sound nice? We completely agree. Let Apple know.)

Sounds Perfect!

Well, this move isn’t without it’s issues. For example, when you delete a picture, what does that mean? Does it delete it in Lightroom or only the preview? What if you’ve imported an original from Photos app? How can you be sure that you’re not about to lose your original data? Should there be a confirmation each and every time? Should there be a trash that you have to empty to confirm?

Every one of these questions may seem obvious at first, but each has it’s own implications logically and with the UI and the workflow that all need to be considered. Yes, you’ll be able to delete, but that delete sword is certainly double-edged.

So, When Will It Be Ready?

In the end, we’d much, much rather be working on new features in the app rather than chasing down demons from ALAssets. And we knew that this new development was going take a fair amount of time. We don’t know exactly how much time – probably “a couple months”. We’re determined to get it right and to heavily test, and know this will just take time.  We’ve become very reluctant to release time frames because we just don’t know; what we can do is keep you informed about current progress.

Yes, this will be a free upgrade for all users. We’ll also need to write migration code to move your existing data into the new format.

Right now, we’ve re-designed the database and have started work on the Import dialog and updating the Lightroom sync to support the new system. We’ve started testing core functionality and memory usage for those functions.  We’ve pulled in some additional developer help as well to help us refactor some of our existing code and truly cut the cord with ALAssets (namely – doing all our own raw data parsing and not relying on iOS for anything). Exciting times ahead!