Show photos on a Tablet? Which software?

[Franglais]

I have been looking at showing my photos on a tablet (iPad or Android)

A couple of weeks ago at the ITIS open day the President was talking to some people and he got out his iPad in it's leather case and went into his collection of images and showed them on the tablet. It was class.

OK so I could buy an iPad but I find it's too big plus I don't like closed systems like Apple (I have an iPhone). I would prefer to have an Android tablet. However I have tried out Android tablets and I find they aren't up to the iPad:

- when you go swoosh-swoosh to pass from one image to another the movement isn't fluid in Android like it is with the iPad. It stalls part way
- when you go tap-tap to enlarge an image on Android you get an enlargement of the image you had on-screen which is visibly pixelised. Even if the JPG original has much higher definition than the screen, you never see it, it gets resampled to the size of the screen at some stage. Whereas on the iPad it's iTunes that resamples the image when loading to the device with a resolution that will look good when you enlarge it.

Anybody else been looking at this? I'm puzzled at why I haven't been able to find better software for doing displays.

[armando_m]

As far as I know itunes changes the jpgs when importing them to the ipad / iphone image library

I have not tried any android device to see my photos

I also do not like the closeness of Apple

[n8]

Perhaps you should research jail breaking. It's like rooting for android...a definite must to look into if you like your open system.

[GB1]

Hey Charles,

Reading this is a little funny because I noticed almost the exact same thing in my tablet experiments!

I've done some looking around. I've found the iPad wins hands down. Apple has always been a visual experience company that cares about that stuff.

Many months back, I examined the Motorola Xoom in the store, comparing to the iPad 2 that was sitting there; it wasn't even close. It wasn't a true image display quality comparison because, unlike the iPad, they didn't even bother to have a true 'display mode' for the Xoom, and there were no high-quality images loaded, just (incredibly crappy) pix taken with its camera. Another part of the problem was that the Xoom's display was so glossy and so easily covered with fingerprints that it interfered with the viewing experience. I also found the image-to-image transition to be far more fluid and natural on the iPad. Last but not least, the entire graphical user interface on that version of Android (3.1 I think) was just very disappointing... it seemed like they just 'put it out', whereas Apple did a study on the subject and engineered theirs. I've never felt that Google sees value in the presentation layer, incidentally.

They do have a new version of Android coming out, I believe .. Ice Cream Sandwich? .. but I'm not sure whether it's for the tablet or for the phones. Anyway, it may help with the fluidity.

I also own an HP Touchpad tablet. I like the webOS operation system, but there are several issues with it's presentation abilities:

- It is 18-bit verses the iPad's 24-bit, meaning that it fundamentally will probably not look as good.
- It also stutters when transitioning between images, handling the first few OK but later choking. Was able to partially fix this by turning off logging, but it's still nowhere near as fluid as my friend's iPad 1 (note the "1")
- Most importantly, or sadly, the Touchpad auto expands the image to fill the screen... so if you have an image < 1024 wide (like an 800 pixel wide image), it will auto expand it, diminishing the quality. This is a fatal flaw IMO when it comes to displaying images
- Some pictures are sharp, whereas others simply do not and will not look sharp. It doesn't matter if the resolution is large or if I resharpen them and reload them: there's something going on here with the display
- Even text doesn't look super sharp on the Touchpad. This affects the viewing experience on images too, of course

The iPad doesn't seem to have ANY of these issues. It is therefore a much better tablet for a photographer to display his work than the HP Touchpad.

Btw, I've found that if I display my images in the Touchpad's file mgmt application that they look sharper. Odd.

With Android, how much is related to the hardware verses the Operating System, or even the application? Don't know.

Have you tried the Samsung Galaxy and the new Sony S? They may indeed be better.

G

[Greg McCary]

Charles I have seen nothing to compare to Apples smooth operating system. I have an IPad 2 and a Toshiba but wouldn't recommend the Toshiba. Its controls are very slow. Maybe with the ICloud things will be better and less constrictive for Apple owners.

[mjs1973]

I was listening to the latest episode of the Martin Baily Photography Podcast today. The topic was Seven Must Have Photography Related iPad Apps. His portfolio app of choice was FolioBook Photo Portfolio

I don't own a tablet so I have no idea what it's like, but Martin was pretty impressed with it. You can find a transcript of the podcast on his site, or download it and listen to it.

[Franglais]

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to carry on looking at this and I'll post my observations.

Last night I decided to load a few hundred images onto my ARCHOS 7o Android tablet. This is a 7 inch device with only 800x480 pixels (10 inch and 1024x768 for the iPad 2). Surprise. The fluidity was pretty similar to the iPad once it got the first image up.

So perhaps the Android Gallery photo viewer is not as dumb as I thought. The iPad is ahead because iTunes optimises the pictures and Apple has "improved" the 1GHz ARM processor that powers all these devices. After Christmas there will be a new generation of tablets with a 1.2GHz twin-core processor so I'm going to wait and see.

- Yes I did check out the Samsung Galaxy Tab (both 8 inch and 10 inch versions). The display is the best (better than iPad), but it still did the hesitation thing
- The Sony tablet also has a nice display but not as good as the Samsung

[Franglais]

Some more news on Android. I have found two Android applications, both free:

- Quickpic is just a better picture display application and it does it very well. The image is optimised - it looks sharper and more brilliant than on a PC screen. Smart stuff. There are three levels of zoom and transitions are smooth. I like this application, I want to use it
- Justpictures is a tool to display images from the hard drive or from picture libraries on Internet. I found it to be rather unpredictable in what it found on my hard drive, the transitions are jerky, etc.

I bought the new ARCHOS 8 G9. This runs the latest version of Android (3.2). Gallery seems to be smoother and detail comes up better than on the devices I tried in shops.

I wonder if the tablets I tried in shops were slow because they were out of memory. Android is a multi-tasking operating system (LINUX) and if you don't close a program it stays in memory. Hundreds of people may have preceded me on the tablets on demonstration and tried all sorts of things. Next time I'll use the System Monitor to close down all applications before doing a test.

[GB1]

I wonder if the tablets I tried in shops were slow because they were out of memory. Android is a multi-tasking operating system (LINUX) and if you don't close a program it stays in memory. Hundreds of people may have preceded me on the tablets on demonstration and tried all sorts of things. Next time I'll use the System Monitor to close down all applications before doing a test.

Hmm.. One of the tenants of Android is that the OS can decide to close a program at any time, due to things like low memory, etc, so I wonder if that would happen. They preach this in Android-development books to say that the app could 'go away' at any time.

Also, though I am not sure, I don't believe a tablet would have those low-memory issues that a PC would, reason being is, when I PC starts running out of memory it normally starts using Virtual Memory, which is slow. That's when it swaps data back and forth with the hard drive, and input/output (I/O) operations to a hard drive are usually an order of magnitude or more slower than using RAM directly. Since there's no hard drive on a tablet, they have to use a different memory model, which is probably something like 'If memory gets low, close the least-recently-used program(s)', or just say 'Out of memory, close some apps before proceeding.'

Of course, a lot of things are supposed to happen in an orderly fashion like this

[Franglais]

The 8GB (or whatever) of Flash memory on the tablet is treated by Android as a disk. It's typically fast to read but slow to write. I can't imagine it being used as a pagefile.

My trick of closing open programs dates from viewing videos under Android 1.6. First the sound would go then the video would slow and freeze and finally the system would crash. If I was quick I could sometimes save it with System Monitor.

But that was in the days when Android was still an operating system for smartphones adapted for tablets. Honeycomb (V3.2) is dedicated to tablets and looks much more solid (so far)

[Greg McCary]

Well my Toshiba does have an HDMI slot. I have used it several times watching YouTube and playing Angry Birds on the big screen. The Toshiba also has a USB that works well. But the Apple blows the navagation of the Toshiba away.
I think the next generation Android tablets would be worth waiting for.