I went to PhotoPlus Expo this year with nothing but some clothes, my phone and an iPad. It allowed me to go light and fast and still be able do all my work.
But what if I’d wanted to access my images at home?
If I’d had the Western Digital My Book Live sitting on my desk back in Alaska, I could have pulled them right up on the iPad. And if I had a RAW viewer/editor app on my iPad, I could edit, resize, adjust and export them for upload or email to a client or to a social media site.
I checked out the Western Digital My Book Live Network Hard Drives at the show, and I have to say, I’m pretty impressed.
Here’s how it works and my short review: Before you leave town, you load or update your master image file onto your My Book Live Hard Drive, plug it into your router, and go.
Then, you install the WD 2go Pro app on the iPad. This allows you to log into your My Book Live personal cloud storage and access all your photos and files at home right on your iPad or other mobile device. (The free version, WD 2go lets you view, but not download or modify files.)
Combine that with a RAW iPad app like piRAWnha or PhotoRAW, or just about any number of other photo apps if you only shoot JPEG, you can open, process and export any one of your images, right on the iPad.
That’s powerful mobility at a very affordable price, when you compare it to most network storage options, which don’t give you mobile device compatibility. We actually tried it right from the WD booth on an older iPad, using the rep’s personal image archive at his house. It seemed to work perfectly. Downloading and editing a RAW image takes more time and processing power, so you need to make sure you quit all the other apps that are currently running on your mobile device.
If you’re looking for a reasonably priced solution for viewing or working with your images on an iPad, I’d check these out. Western Digital has a great reputation for making solid hard drives; all of my internal drives are WD and I rely on them every single day.
The My Book Live currently comes in 1, 2 and 3 TB configurations.
Dan, great post. We do a lot of traveling and you are right, this is a great step forward, a personal cloud accessible from the iPad anywhere, wonderful. And, this is the first I have heard about it, so thank you!
Tom
The downside to this is that you have to leave your hard-drive on whenever you leave. An external hard drive that stays on for days or weeks is an invitation to data loss. Why not just upload your files to drop box and then synch whatever you plan to work on? That way you can access the files via a multiple of apps and have triple redundancy backups on whatever files you’re working on.
I do use Dropbox, and it’s certainly a good option as well.
The downside to this is that you have to leave your hard-drive on whenever you leave. An external hard drive that stays on for days or weeks is an invitation to data loss. Why not just upload your files to drop box and then synch whatever you plan to work on? That way you can access the files via a multiple of apps and have triple redundancy backups