Ian.Dobinson
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 p.1 #3 · Ipad Users , something interesting | |
Sure Paul,
The airstash holds a standard SD card (of any size) .
You connect the iPad (or other device) to the airstash via wifi . So to do this you have to drop off your existing wifi network and join the airstash.
As I mentioned there are plenty of media streamers from then likes of kingston , western digital, Seagate etc. they all seem to do the same in this respect . ie creat it's own network.
One connected you use the airstash app which finds the airstash ,
You then have a ui that's very similar to the 'Dropbox' app or the 'file browser' app. ie the left side has files and folders and the right is the viewing panel. You can like the other apps view in full screen also
If the card has images on it they appear on the left with their extension (xxxxxx.jpg) . You can view these in the pane on the right hand side. If the images are in separate folders you can go into a folder and the files are then listed (I have come accross some file apps that ignor folders completely and just lis files which is a pain, but this is better)
If you want to do more than browse there is an option to import from the card. This brings up. Preview thumbnail box where you tick the images you want or you can select all . It only does 1 folder at a time which is a good thing as then you don't have to wade thru so many images. Then you import.
It's pretty quick . The. Images go straight to the camera roll , so you can then build them into albums in the photo app on te iPad.
Until now I think this is very similar to those other media devices. They all seem to have their own app and can hold photos and video files.
BUT THIS IS WHERE THE AIRSTASH DIFFERES.
While still in the airstash app.
You also have the option of exporting files to the airstash. It's done in much the same way as importing. You bring up the export box which has a list of your albums in , you goto an album , choose the images and export.
There is a later firmware which allows you to create folders on the card from the app (previous firmware only used folders already on the card) .
I did say it was slower than importing , but I've done it a few times since and it seems to be the same. (maybe the signal was not so good the first time) .
If your camera takes SD then you can plug that card straight into the airstash. At the moment as I shoot to CF (waiting for a cf/SD adapter) I have had to copy over the DCIM folder to an SD card for testing.
Here's another good bit I've found:
I've always struggled with raw on the iPad. It can't use raw properly and raw takes up to much space, takes much longer to upload and is a general pain.
If you shoot raw+jpeg you can't easily separate the 2 formats . I have found an app called Filebrowser that does it , but it locks the files into its own not very good (for images) app . You can't export the images back to camera roll.
Anyway , if you have RAW files on the card to import, there is an option to convert to jpeg. So it only imports a jpeg from your raw file. You don't need to shoot dual format , and the raw stays on the card.
You can send files to ther apps. But it seems to be only one file at a time . This is probably a restriction of apples doing, as I've come across this in many other apps also. If the file is largelike a movie it takes a while to do, and the recieving app may not take the file .(I tried to send a movie to cinexplayer that didn't seem to receive it. Probably the recieving apps fault)
Oh and you can stream movies etc to multiple devices , again much like the other media streamers.
So that's it Basicly. It's not without it's faults.
You can't flck in and out of the app to do other things while importing/exporting (although it will pick up from where it left off when exporting , but you have to start the proccess again)
It seems to turn itself off sometimes when you swap cards . Not a big deal but still a bit of a pain.
And when I was streaming music to my iPad the app didn't run in the background . So if you come out of the app the music stops. I have an android phone that has an app as well. And it's would stream in the background .
On the whole it's a good little device.
If I wanted a solid stpstate media streamer then Kingston make one which is cheaper. But it has a fixed amount of memeory. WD and Seagate make larger disk based streamers but you have the issues of carrying around a hard drive all the time (and they cost a bit more)
But other than the very pricey fixed storage size iflash dive which plugs directly into the iPad I have not seen any other device that you can send image files to .
As I said it cost me £80 , which I think for what it does is a decent price. (SD memory is cheap) .
If the iPad wasn't so restrictive in the things it allows you to do with YOUR OWN files I wouldn't have such a use for a device like this .
But it's not and I can't see apple giving any greater access to the files. So this has some good uses.
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