iPad Tutorial: Blogging

Welcome! Here is part three in my series of how I use my iPad for paper crafting. So far we have covered a few things about what I LOVE about my iPad but today, I'm going to explain what I DON'T use my iPad for and why. Maybe you can make up your own mind about it and save yourself a headache.

Blogging - it takes up just about as much of my paper crafting time as the actual crafting does. I enjoy it, but I would love to maximize my use of time and get things done faster if I can.

On my iPad, I downloaded an app called BlogPress. Now don't get me wrong. It is fantastic for quick blog updates and editing and the app has had quite a few good updates since I first started using it. I use it quite frequently and in fact, I am using it right now.

The thing that I don't like about it can best be explained by saying this. At first I thought that this would be a great way to quickly use the iPad to take a photo of a finished project and post it online. But let me show you what I found:

This photo taken and uploaded with iPad and BlogPress app.

Yes, that was fast and easy, but what I didn't realize was how much the quality of my photos would suffer. I'm at a bit of a loss to explain exactly why this happens because I am just not *quite* that techy. The funny thing is, that when I see the published post on my iPad, the photos don't look so bad. It wasn't until I actually went back and viewed the posts on my desktop computer that I noticed the big difference. Compare:

*At this point I switched from iPad to desktop publishing*

This photo taken with Kodak  digital camera, uploaded to computer
and added to the post the "traditional" way.

For the photo above, I followed my previous way of taking a photo with my camera and uploading with my desktop computer. Much better! I'm still upset about quite a few of last years' posts where I used iPad photos instead of camera photos. Lesson learned: the faster method just isn't as good.

It should be said that the iPad that I use is an iPad 2. Maybe it is the quality of photos that the iPad 2 takes that is the problem. I tried many things to figure out if the problem was the iPad camera, or the app, and I think that I decided that the problem was a little bit of both.

To try to resolve this problem, I did try taking photos with my camera, uploading the camera photos to the iPad, then using BlogPress to blog the camera photos. I also tried uploading photos taken by both methods to PhotoBucket, and adding the links to the posts rather than using the BlogPress photo uploader. The results were still not as good as I would have liked. To be honest, this wasn't saving me any time either. The bottom line is, I do see the big difference and it is important to me to have better quality photos. So for now, I'll stick to my desktop publishing, unless my post is just for text.

I'm pretty sure that I've heard that the photo quality and resolution has improved with the newer model iPads, so maybe that is another answer. But for now, I love this one and use it way more than enough for it to be "worth it" to me. Maybe some day my poor iPad 2 will bite the dust. When that happens, I'll have to try again with a newer model, and I'll let you know what I think!

Thanks for stopping by and I hope that maybe this post has been helpful for you iPad / papercrafters out there. Next week I'll continue with some more tips. 

Oh - that cute stamp set? It's by My Favorite Things and you should definitely be on the lookout for more examples of them over at Stars & Stamps. . . just sayin'.  :)