i’ve used an ipad as my personal “laptop” for probably five years at this point. first, an 11" M1 ipad air, then — and now — a 13" M4 ipad pro. i do have a personal nuc running linux which is where i shell to do most of my personal programming projects. but most of my photography process is done solely on the ipad — or my iphone via apple shortcuts. since july of 2026, i do now have a personal 16" m2 macbook pro — my old work machine. and i also have a 2015 thinkpad x1 carbon running windows that i haven’t touched in probably 5y at this point. at one point i did try running lightroom classic and negative lab pro and it was just a painful experience.

my main priority is enjoyment. and i enjoy flexibility and convience most. i take my ipad everywhere. it’s small — will probably go back to an 11" next time. light and extremely portable. i like using touch to interact with my photos. i try to do minimal editing to my photos anyway — it’s a personal philosophy. edits aren’t “real life”. yes, they can be used when you have a particular vision, but i do try to avoid too much editing. i do enjoy editing sometimes though. it’s one of the only truly creative things that i do. i want to be able to edit on the go. edit in a coffee shop. edit in the airport. edit in the car when i wait for my wife in tjmaxx.

because my primary device is an ipad. i’ve leaned toward mobile-first apps like darkroom.co and photomator. lightroom mobile was excellent, but if i can get a similar experience from an app that offers a lifetime “subscription” for ~$100, i’ll prefer that, hence darkroom and photomator. i only discovered photomator at the end of 2025 and didn’t start using it as my main editor until august of 2026. one of the reasons is because for a long time — even with darkroom — i fought adding my camera photos to apple photos. i never wanted my apple photos to include camera photos. two reasons: one, i didn’t want to waste icloud space — this is fixable because once you delete a photo the space is restored. two, my apple photos automatically get synced to google photos — this is the main problem and these do not get cleaned up automatically and space saving again is the priority. i have as of august 2026 given in and do use apple photos for loading my images. primarily because that’s what works best. as of recently, i actually use the leica app wireless and without connecting my sd card to scroll through photos and download them to the leica apple photos album. then i open this album in darkroom or photomator, edit, then run an apple shortcut that uploads them to GCS, creates a photo post on my site and re-deploys my site.