Photographers Embrace The iPad

As Editorial Director of Condé Nast Digital, Jamie Pallot is responsible for content and user experience across the company's standalone Web brands, including Style.com, Epicurious.com, Concierge.com and Brides.com. He also oversees the creative development of mobile applications for those sites, and played a key role in shaping the GQ e-reader application. Mr. Pallot came to Condé Nast Digital from Time Inc. Interactive where, as an editorial consultant, he oversaw a redesign of People.com.

Here are the five principal issues which have stuck in my mind as we have worked through the development of an iPad e-reader platform for some of the Condé Nast magazines.

1. Photos on the iPad look gorgeous. The device will rekindle (pun intended) readers' enthusiasm for looking at pictures, simply because the graphics are so rich and immersive.
2. The relationship between image and caption takes on a new dimension. Being able to control whether or not a caption is displayed, or have captions shift in sync with images as you move through a slideshow, brings more meaningful - and sometimes playful - integration between visual and textual information.
3. Navigation becomes part of the fun. One of the things that makes the iPad so compelling is the intensely tactile interface. The pleasure that a user takes in looking at a picture becomes inseparable from the pleasure he or she takes in swiping, tapping, or using myriad other physical gestures to interact with images.

Creativity is not limited to the photographer. The designers and engineers who devise new ways of displaying, storing, and interacting with images now have an important seat at the table.

There will be a greater sense of ownership on the part of the user. Some publishers will allow readers to save pictures from e-magazines to their own libraries, where they can organize them, play with them, even alter them as they wish. There's a perceived downside here for some photographers, who lose control of their creations, and for the people who manage rights and permissions. More negotiations, more legal issues, more paperwork. That's the realistic counterpoint to the brilliance of this new device and what it allows us to do.