It’s been a while coming, but alas it isn’t Adobe who released it. What am I talking about?

A new Apple iPad app called Photosmith. This app is designed to work with Adobe Lightroom, hence my interest. However, as mentioned above, it wasn’t developed by Adobe. No, Photosmith was developed two seasoned programmers (and avid photographers), Chris Horne and Chris Morse. This is what they have to say on their website.

Photosmith offers photographers on-the-go tools that haven’t been seen in apps before. Full RAW viewing capability, including 100% zoom on 20+ megapixels cameras. Uploading images and tagging to Flickr, Facebook, and Dropbox. IPTC tagging, rating, keywording, all with full sync from the iPad to Lightroom, using the free plugin for Lightroom. Photosmith is poised to change the landscape for digital photographers. For less than half of the price of Apples iPad Camera Connection Kit, Photosmith completes the mobile digital workflow.

I haven’t had much time to work with it yet, but the UI is fairly simple to follow. Here are few quick thoughts and screen grabs to wet your appetite.

The Grid view is the main view in which the application displays thumbnails of your current images and any collections you may have created.  The collection list, on the left, has a number of special collections (All Photos, Last Imported, etc), which are automatically created and populated for you. It’s also possible to create your own collections (Garron Head in example shown below) by dragging the thumbnail image across to the Collection bar. You can create as many of your own collections as you like.

Grid View – Collections

While Grid View is useful for seeing everything at a glance it’s loupe view that allows view the image at mostly-full-screen. It also gives you a panel for managing the metadata. In this view, you can:

• Rotate the photo
• Auto Advance (so a single tap moves to the next photo)
• Reject
• Label (red, yellow, green, blue, purple)
• Star (1-5; or whatever system works for you)
• View the EXIF metadata – shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc
• Edit any of the IPTC fields (Creator, Location city, state, zip, etc)

Loupe view – Keywords and Metadata

Full screen view

It’s also possible to view raw files at 100%, but the rendering can be a tad slow, at least it is on the first generation iPad. Over the next week or so I’ll see how it performs in the real world. In the meantime, more details on Photosmith and where it will be of use to Lightroom users can be found on the developers website and Apples iTunes App Store.