Here is a non-photography tip that will help a lot of you photographers out there. The iPad is great for showcasing your photos and portfolio to clients and friends. A handful of you probably gotten your hands on one like I did. And a handful of you probably blogs with Wordpress like I do.
But one problem with blogging on the iPad is the uploading of photos. The official Wordpress app is disappointing to say the least, I much prefer the original web interface. But yet the web interface does not allow photo uploads. Fortunately, I figured out a way to painlessly upload photos and still stick to the original Wordpress web interface.
Things you need:
- A FTP client for iPad. (e.g. FTP On The Go Pro)
- Add-from-server Wordpress plugin
Step 1
While you have your computer with you, install the Add-from-server plugin on your Wordpress blog. What the plugin does is it attaches any photos you uploaded via FTP to specific posts. This is one of the main reason the official Wordpress app doesn’t work for me, as photo uploads are not attached to the post. I make use of it to automatically display photos such as the one above this post.
Step 2
Install your favorite FTP client on your iPad. At the time of this writing, only FTP On The Go Pro is available for iPad, but it is also one of the best FTP app among the iPhone ones. Get it installed, and make sure you can connect to your server.
Step 3
Now you are ready to blog on the go with your iPad! Draft up your post as you would on your computer via Safari, and when you are ready to upload a photo, save your post and fire up your FTP app.
The beauty of FTP On The Go Pro is that it has a built-in browser which can be used to download photos. Unless you need to do editing on the photos, this allows you to use just one app to download and upload the photos directly to your server.
Upload the photos to /wp-content/ on your server. When you are done, switch back to Safari.
Step 4
Go back to your Wordpress post and click on the Media Manager button beside “Upload/Insert”. Since you’ve installed Add-from-server, you should see a new link. Click on that and you are now presented with a FTP-like view of the photos you uploaded earlier. Select the photos and click Import. When the import is done, simply close and reopen Media Manager, and you should now see a new tab named Gallery. Since you are already a Wordpress user, I’m sure you know what to do next to insert the photos into your post.
Conclusion
And there you have it, a rather painless way to upload photos to your Wordpress blog that behaves just like a regular photo upload from your computer. Now that your photos are imported, you can also log in to your FTP server again to delete the photos from /wp-content/ to save some diskspace.
The iPad is no substitute to a laptop for fast and efficient work, but this is just to show you that it is quite possible to get things done too on an iPad. And yes, this entire post is written on my iPad.
