Pre-Script:
This rant is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of date because Photosmith is no longer supported. <multiple expletives deleted>!!!!!
Original rant <unpublished and untouched for a couple years>:
Photosmith (Psmith) 3.0 is out and I am mostly thrilled. I bought the 2.x version some time ago because it promised to help me with one of my biggest needs. In my opinion, Lightroom’s (LR) biggest flaw is its inability to natively and safely allow access to a single catalog from multiple machines. Although Psmith doesn’t solve that problem, it helps alleviate one aspect of the problem: tagging on the go.
I want to be able to take portions of my LR catalog with me while traveling or eating and set image meta-data including tags and stars. I do not care about editing on the go, that’s what my color managed workstation in the dark room (no pun intended) is for. I have a small laptop but LR is not multi-machine friendly. And even at 4 lbs, it is too big to lug around everywhere I go. When I heard about Psmith and read the reviews, I thought it was just what I was looking for. Except it is iPad/iOS only. I’m a Wintel & Android guy. I ended up buying an iPad (no, not just for Psmith, but it had an influence). Before, I only thought I hated Apple. Now I know, but that’s another rant.
Anyway, Psmith allows me to define photo collections and sync them with Psmith on the iPad, tag them on the iPad, and then sync back to my desktop. Wonderful. I changed my workflow to include Psmith. I changed my actions to fit the tool so it had better be worth it. Well, in 2.x, the functionality was there but the stability was not. I had issues establishing a wireless connection for syncing. I had continuous random crashes. I stopped using it but kept waiting for the upgrade. See my previous review here.
Knowing a little about what it is like trying to hold down a day job and produce quality software on the side, I cut the devs a lot of slack. I still demanded a lot, but I understood when it fell short.
When 3.0 came out, I upgraded (free, yea) and started using it again. The upgrade of the app was mostly painless. The only pain came from moving images from the iPad photo-roll to Psmith. Actually, the painful part had nothing to do with Psmith, it was selectively deleting 1000+ photos from the iPad. PSmith transferred fine.
The release took a long time. No problem for me. Better to get it right than to get it early.
I have not been using it as much as before, but I will be. The stability has been significantly improved. I have read reports that it is also faster but I don’t see it on my 4th gen iPad. I have noticed one problem that I had reported on 2.x that still exists but happens much less frequently. At times, the tagging search panel collapses making it impossible to search for an existing tag. That only happens when I have a large number of images selected so it may be a resource limit issue but whatever the cause, it’s a minor annoyance not a major bug.
I believe Photosmith has now arrived and I can recommend it without reservation.
-PS-
I am posting this along time after I wrote it becasue I kept wanting to add more to it. Now I have an EyeFi Card and have even more to say, so there will be more to come soon(ish).