The Apple iPad doesn’t have a camera—yet. But it does have a big, beautiful, multi-touch screen. And that makes it one of the best devices ever built for browsing and manipulating images.
Mobile app developers have realized this, and have created a profusion of fascinating apps for editing or simply exploring photographs. In fact, there are way more iPad photo apps in the iTunes App Store than anyone has time to check out. So, having explored the breadth of what apps can let you do on your iPad back in a June column, “26 Apps to Drive Your iPad Wild!,” I thought this week I’d take a deeper look at photo-related apps.
I actually mentioned two photo apps in the “26 Apps” column. One was Photo Pad, a great tool for accessing your photo collections on Flickr, and the other was Guardian Eyewitness, an amazing app that brings you one arresting example of photojournalism each day, curated by the editors of the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Those are still among my favorites, along with the 10 apps listed below.
There’s one app on this list that isn’t actually an iPad app—it’s Instagram, a fun iPhone app that works just as well on the iPad. The other outlier is Camera for iPad, an unusual app that acts as a wireless bridge between your iPhone and your iPad and only works when you have it installed on both devices.
I should say that as cool as all of these apps are, I don’t think we’ve yet seen the true killer photo app for the iPad—something like an iPad version of the newly updated iPhoto application for the Mac. That may have to await the next version of the iPad, which is certain to have at least a front-facing camera for FaceTime and, unless Apple wants to disappoint me greatly, will also include a regular camera at least as good as the one in the iPhone 4.
