iPhoto For iOS Saves Edits Back To And Deletes Photos From Camera Roll

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This will actually delete the photo from your iPad. Careful now!
This will actually delete the photo from your iPad. Careful now!

IPhoto 2.0 for iOS has two amazing new features that no other photo editing has, nor will have for the foreseeable future: It can write its edits directly back to the iOS Camera Roll, and it can delete photos from the Camera Roll. This pretty much means you can now do all your photo organizing right from the app.

Federico Viticci, the sleepy-eyed sexpot founder of Mac Stories, made this discovery by the unusual means of actually reading the release notes of the app. And thank God he did, because it makes iPhoto around a zillion times more useful.

Now, when you edit a photo in iPhoto, any changes you make are written to the original file on your camera roll. This means that you no longer have to maintain two separate libraries: one canonical library in the system-wide Photos library, and one in iPhoto. Further, any edits you make are lossless. Here’s an example.

Say you clean up the white balance add a filter in iPhoto. You then open up the picture in Photos app. You see your edits immediately, but if you edit the photo here, it reverts to the original, unedited file. That is, your originals are left untouched.

You can also delete photos from your camera roll using iPhoto. This is great, and means you can quickly triage a photoshoot, flagging the bad pictures, then selecting all flagged photos and deleting them at once.

Not everything carries across between the two. Viticci tested Photo Stream and the edits aren’t picked up and shared there yet. And I had a poke around in EXIF metadata and found that it, too, is left out: I added a tag and a caption (photo title) in iPhoto, then exported the picture via e-mail from the Photos app. The added metadata is missing when I open the file in Lightroom.

I have a few grand plans formulating in my brain to take advantage of this, and you will hear about them soon enough. I have a feeling that this might finally make the iPad a practical place to take care of all your photos, eliminating the need for a computer. And it might have tipped me over the edge to buy a new 128GB Retina mini.

Source: Mac Stories

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