Release day for iPadOS is finally here. It was even a little late and 13.1. And yet I'm still having issues.
First of all, my SD card, even though macOS and my a7R III could read it fine, required me to format it in my camera before my iPad Pro would read it.
Second of all, my Samsung T5 SSD (USB-C) and G-Drive portable 2.5" HDD (USB-A 3.0) mounted fine. When the SD card wouldn't mount, I unplugged those drives. When I got the SD Card to mount, the Samsung T5 wouldn't mount until I plugged it back into my iMac. I had it in my iMac moving files around before putting it into the iPad Pro and it was fine, but then after putting it back into my Mac the drive was acting weird and refused to dismount even though I didn't have anything at all using it (I even closed out of every single app). Eventually after a half hour it released it.
Once I got the SD card and T5 to both mount with my HyperDrive USB-C Hub for iPad Pro, it was fine when I just tried moving 60 42MP RAW photos (about 41-43MB each), which was about three times more than I ever got to move on 13.0 betas. Though it did lock up at first and on my iMac I noticed that it said it was preparing to copy them. Apparently it was putting them all into iCloud copy/paste and that's why everything froze up because that was a couple gigs.
So then I tried to do something I would typically do, which is to move an SD card that was about 2/3 full. I usually use 64GB cards, so I tried moving the entire 43GB off my card by dragging and dropping the DCIM folder and it seemed like the progress circle was moving and making progress. Well, it seems like it failed at some point while I was lifting weights because when I got back my iPad was asleep and the T5 was disconnected (the SD card was still mounted) and I had to try replugging it a few times to get it to show back up.
So what I tried next was to go into my DCIM folder, select the images folder, and then go to select, then select all, then this time tapped move and selected my T5. So now it is currently moving each photo individually, and it seems like it just finished, and I scrolled through all of them and it moved all 1100+ except it looks like three of them messed up, lol. They're grayed out and won't open and instead of today's date like all the others, it shows the date it was shot on. Weird. Only thing I can think of is this time I tried to stay close to it so it wouldn't sleep (I was browsing the web and then started writing this post) and it did briefly go to sleep and I immediately woke it back up seconds later, so maybe the three simultaneous transfers it was moving during that time had a failure? Still pretty ridiculous that it doesn't seem to keep file transfers alive while the iPad is sleeping. I get that it wants to save battery because the drives are using power, but at least wait until the end because that kinda ruins my whole day when I have to babysit multiple SD card dumps.
So yeah, the files app is still a bit of a disaster. It has improved quite a bit, but this is iPad OS 13.1. It should be solid by now. I was right to be worried that it wouldn't be ready in time for launch. Maybe for casual users who are just moving a few files around, but not for professionals—and "Pro" is in the name, after all. I'm sure it will take several more iterations and quite a bit of time before I begin to rely on it for any sort of serious workflow. I still make backups of my drives before plugging them in because I don't trust it, which completely negates the functionality to need to have a Mac to make sure nothing goes wrong and then to plug drives into to get them to be recognized on the other side. Maybe it comes down to my SSD being EXFAT or the SD card being EXFAT, but that's what it formats to when I format in-camera so that's probably what it needs, right? And EXFAT is supposed to be supported and is probably used in lots of digital cameras. I have a Sony a7R III which is from a very popular line of professional mirrorless cameras and came out less than two years ago.
[automerge]1569386074[/automerge]
Calling myself out on this. You all know firsthand that it's not ready, and Apple isn't calling it ready, but deferring it to a later update.
Just admitting that I was wrong.
Takes a lot to admit that, thanks. The reason I made the thread was that it seemed so bad that I had a hard time believing it would be ready in time for launch and hoped that more people would file reports. And here we are and it still doesn't quite work right. I know that I don't feel safe relying on it. It has come a long way for sure, but it's still too finicky and prone to failure. It's a shame. Hopefully 80% of these issues will be ironed out in the next point update and by spring we'll be golden, but it's going to take some time to earn that trust. Until then I'll still be lugging my MBP around just to dump photos on the road.