Collections are a great way to help group your photos into useful chunks in Photosmith. In this training video, we offer some tips and tricks for how to best use collections in keeping your catalog tidy:
Photosmith 3.1 – Organize from Photosmith App on Vimeo.
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While our Engineering Team works to iron out some bugs related to iOS 7.1, the Creative Team recently started production on some training videos to compliment our existing (some might even call verbose) online documentation.
The first topic we’re covering is importing your photos into Photosmith from your iPad’s Camera Roll:
Photosmith 3.1 – Import from Photosmith App on Vimeo.
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March 10, 2014
A few minutes ago, Apple released an update to iOS. This update, iOS version 7.1, will cause Photosmith to crash to your iPad’s home screen after importing images from Photos.app / Camera Roll and when converting link/copy. This app crash isn’t as catastrophic as it appears – It’s a display-only bug, and your photos and metadata are perfectly safe. No data loss will result from this crash. Restarting Photosmith after the crash will show all your previously imported photos in Photosmith’s catalog (including the photos imported and converted just prior to the crash). You may continue working as your normally would in Photosmith.
More importantly, Photosmith will continue functioning as it did prior to updating to iOS 7.1. Importing photos via Eye-Fi, FTP, iTunes, or when syncing with Lightroom, isn’t impacted by this issue. This is an issue specific with how we’re handing the import dialog window after the import is completed. Instead of closing the import window and displaying the normal Photosmith interface, the entire Photosmith app shuts down.
Every major and minor release of iOS from Apple contains its share of quirks, which are usually addressed through a process of non-public beta testing between developers and Apple. Once Apple feels this internal testing has run its natural course, they traditionally issue a final “Gold Master” version of the iOS update, which is then sent back to developers for testing a few days ahead of its public release. This is when our final testing usually occurs, and is the time when we usually make any necessary adjustments to Photosmith. The root cause of our app crash is an iOS bug introduced in iOS 7.1 – we didn’t anticipate this issue living through to the final public release.
This isn’t our first rodeo: We’ve observed iOS issues in beta versions which caused all sorts of havoc with Photosmith, but these were always fixed by the good folks at Apple by the time the “Gold Master” version was released. We’re not keen on wasting hours, days, or even weeks of development time working around an iOS issue in our app, only to have it ultimately not be an issue in the final shipped version of iOS.
The difference this time around, however, is that Apple didn’t provide a “Gold Master” of iOS 7.1 to developers prior to the official public release. Today was our first opportunity to see the final release… after it was already public.
We are already working on a fix for the import and convert window crashes, but for now, you may safely import from Camera Roll and convert links/copies, and expect Photosmith to crash at the conclusion of the import or convert. Then relaunch Photosmith and get to work adding tags, star and color ratings, pick, reject flags, then sync it all to Lightroom, if that’s your workflow. If you experience any other issues with iOS 7.1, please let our Support Team know: support.photosmithapp.com
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With the release of Photosmith version 3.1, we introduced native camera raw processing, right in the Photosmith for iPad app. Unlike most other iOS photography apps, we no longer rely on the JPG preview which many cameras embed within a camera raw file, nor do we utilize Apple’s iOS for camera raw support. By decoding camera raw files ourselves, we’re able to display photos from a far larger number of camera models and camera raw formats.
We just updated our list of supported cameras – and we’re really excited. The big list currently stands at well over 400 camera models, including several for which iOS support has been limited or non-existent, like FujiFilm RAF files and Leica’s version of DNG.
The list is over at photosmithapp.com/cameras If your camera model isn’t listed, please let us know; this list is a living document which will be updated on a regular basis to reflect new cameras that Photosmith can decode, for both newly released models and older niche camera raw formats.
If you experience any issues with our camera raw processing engine, please give our Support Team a shout at support.photosmithapp.com – We’re currently tracking a few issues relating to importing RAW+JPG and other odds-and-ends. Of course, Photosmith is under active development, and a quick list of issues we’re tracking is at http://www.photosmithapp.com/ind/known-issues/
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February 15, 2014
Photosmith version 3.1 is now available in the iOS App Store for iPad. The companion plugin for Lightroom is also available, but updating requires a little extra effort this time around. We made a quick one minute video showing how to properly update the Photosmith plugin for Lightroom:
Please note that the new Photosmith plugin requires Lightroom 4 or newer.
As we previously mentioned, the big updates this time around are native camera raw rendering and a vastly improved Lightroom sync dashboard. There’s also more bug fixes than we care to bore you with… but probably will in a future blog post. 
Also, as promised, we just released our comprehensive User Guide – over 200 pages of everything you ever wanted to know about Photosmith (but were afraid to ask). This PDF is perfect for downloading and keeping handy for offline reference, perhaps stored in your iBooks app on your iPad. However, be aware that like our Knowledge Base documents (from which the User Guide is based), it’s a work in progress.
Photosmith version 3.1 app for iPad and Lightroom plugin are free updates for existing users. New users can scoop up the app for $19.99 USD (or equivalent local currency).
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