Reviews for Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit

Like many other people I read the reviews of this product on this site.

The good ones seemed too good to be true and the bad ones very nearly scared me off.

But one did suggest taking your camera to the store and trying before you buy. This was the most useful to me and the Apple store staff patiently waited while I checked my little Casio SLR and my ancient Sony A100.

Both worked beautifully and I bought on the spot. I normally shoot in RAW on my Sony but there aren't a great number of apps able to cope with them.

More are coming though and the ease of which I can now transfer my pics (including from my iPhone) has made this one of the most useful accessories I have bought yet.

A great little product but, if possible, check before you buy.

I have just purchased the Apple Camera Connection Kit for my New iPad Gen 3 and it worked perfectly.

My Nikon D7000 D-SLR camera created both RAW (NEF) and JPG files on two separate SD cards (SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB SDHC 95MB/s Class 10 UHS-1) and the Camera Connection kit recognised the card instantly, displayed thumbnails of all the photos, transferred the photos to the iPad and deleted them from the SD card.

I noticed that copying the RAW files took much longer to transfer than the JPG and that it power consumption increased too.

Unlike a lot of other reviewers, I have found this device to work well. I have used it with a Fuji Coolpix and a Canon EOS 7D without issue. I would give it 5 stars, but the £25 price tag seems a bit steep.

I use a canon eos 500D and take out it's sd card. This device gets the pictures and video from the camera straight onto the iPad for viewing. Couldn't be easier, and I love it!

If your camera uses an SD card and you travel a lot, then this accessory is a godsend. Importing to your iPad is easy, and lets you review all your pictures in the original format (just make sure you have the appropriate settings for this), thus freeing space on your card.
More importantly, that means that unless you need to edit your pictures on photoshop, you won't have to carry your heavy laptop with you anymore.
Thanks to its great screen and amazing battery, the iPad fits really perfectly as the photographer's best friend.

Now there are a few things that could (should) be improved:
1/ there should be a CF card reader, especially for professionals
2/ importing to the iPad should offer the option to arrange photos in the folder of your choice. The current set up (puts them in a last import folder) is ok but not ideal.
3/ exporting from the iPad is a little tedious, there should be an auto import (and not to iPhoto library!!) pop up when you plug in the iPad with new pictures on.

Other than that, it works really smoothly, and will make many photographers' life easier when moving around with heavy kits and backpacks.

OK Here is the problem I amn having with the CCK (or wiperhpas it is an issue with iOS5).

First, I was using theCCK under iOS 4.3 without difficulty. I have both the Apple CCK and a thrid party one for CF cards. Both work fione.

However, a peculiar thing has happened since upgrading my iPad2 to iOS 5. I frequently upload hi-res images (e.g., 4288X2848 12.2mp, etc.) from my Nikon cameras to my iPad2 using the Apple Camera Connection Kit. Prior to iOS 5, I had no issues; all images were transferred and stored, and loaded/recognized by literally dozens of my photo apps in their native resolution.

After an upgrade to iOS 5, all the hi-res images restored to my iPad during the process that had been there from those previous uploads and new camera uploads since the upgrade, are being loaded into many/most apps at a much lower resolution, e.g., 2048X1360 (2.8mp). I have several EXIF viewer apps that report the correct native resolution (and all other metadata), but several EXIF viewer apps show the lower resolution of the exact same image. I have copied the images back to my PC and they are in fact still 12mp hi-resolution as they came out of the cameras, so it has something to do with the "hand off" of images from storage to the individual apps as they load them.

Images uploaded via iTunes, which I understand are "optimized" to a medium res by iTunes during the upload, are correctly reported/loaded at the same resolution exactly as stored. Even hi-res images transferred via wifi applications to the Camera Roll are reported correctly by all EXIF and photo editing apps. It is only the ones being uploaded via the camera connection kit that are "downsampled" when read by most (but not all) apps. I have tried three different cameras, all Nikons.

I wonder if anyone else has exeperienced this, and can confirm this for me, and if this is a bug in IOS 5, or is the OS handing off "optimized" versions of the images to those apps? And why do some apps load the high resolution image without difficulty, is that an app "programming issue"?

Those of you using the CCK, please check the EXIF data and see what gets reported.

Just uploaded direct from my Canon 7D, RAW files via the USB camera connection no problems at all. Seemed fairly quick as well. Great for previewing the pictures on the iPad.

Can confirm it works fine on iPad 2 (32Gb) with iOS 4.3.1.

Would be nice to have the option for Compact Flash.

Thanks to the reviewers who stated this product worked with their Canon Powershot S95 photos & various SanDisk cards, I ordered it for a recent diving holiday away with my iPad 2. I had no problems at all with the hardware, my underwater photos were all RAW+JPG and both appeared to be transferred because I used 15GB of space on the iPad (all I had!) with around 1000 photos. It was comfortable at least to know I had them backed up! My SD cards were 2* 8GB SanDisk Extreme (Class 6, 20MB/s) and a 4GB SanDisk Extreme (Class 6, 20MB/s). No problems there at all. For the record, I always put the card in the adaptor first, then put the adaptor into the iPad. After a few seconds, it opened the Photos app and showed the card contents, from where I could transfer them.

For me, it really was a godsend to be able to review my photos at the end of every day, deleting those which were no good off both the iPad and camera (manually).

I do have some major criticisms of the process once your photos are on the device, however:

1. The photos are read into the Photos app and listed under "Events" based on when you imported them, not when they were taken. For example, I imported several times on one day as I was running out of iPad disk space, these all showed up in separate Events with the same date, which was annoying. You can't rename or move anything in the app either.
2. You can't edit the photos at all with the Photos app; I wanted to send some cropped shots to friends, not possible. The free Photoshop app lets you crop, but has no send to email function! In the end I bought Filterstorm, which turned out to be an excellent piece of software.
3. The iPad doesn't say whether the files it displays are the JPGs or RAW files, but when you delete a photo, it certainly clears 12-15MB of space, so it seems to be deleting both files.
4. This is the killer - when I got home and downloaded my photos from the SD card to PC (through USB), I wanted to delete the files from the iPad to get back the space. This is when I realised you can only do this ONE FILE at a time! Each deletion takes about 5 seconds because you have to wait for the animation to complete...! It took me more than an hour to get this done, I've never been so bored in my life.
5. I don't know how you access the photos from iTunes, I didn't see them anywhere. I did notice the auto backup it performed when first plugged in took about 20 minutes, and took 15GB out of my PC disk, but of course you can't access those backup files... I don't have my iPad to hand, so maybe I missed something...

I have looked for apps that allow you to manage the photo library layout but reading the user reviews, none of them do what I want. It seems to me that an iPad paired to a Mac is great, you can do what you want in iPhoto, but for those of us in PC land, there's nothing you can do.

In summary, 5* for the hardware, 2* for the supporting software, so I've been generous and given 4* overall!

Ok so I can download photos easily, so far so good but why can't I download any videos from my video camera. I am using the SD card but it says no pictures to import and I can't work out what I am doing wrong. I can download them to my lap top but not my i pad. Is it the video camera (Panasonic)

If you just want to import images from your camera (either by USB or from SD card) then it works well. It would be more useful if you could see full screen previews before and select to import or delete and would be perfect if you could control your camera using the USB adaptor.