Getting Video into iMovie on the iPad without iCloud

A few months ago I wrote a post, My Kingdom for a Local iPad Data Store, talking about how I wanted to be able to use iMovie on the iPad to edit my drone videos. The problem was that in order to get the videos into iMovie they had to be in iCloud Photo Library or in iCloud Drive, but I didn’t want them to be uploaded and then maybe downloaded from the cloud because they are large files. Over the weekend I had an epiphany and figured out how to work around this by doing some offline file shuffling.

  1. Turn on Airplane mode to prevent any internet connection from occurring.
  2. Connect a Lightning to USB adapter with an attached SD card reader to the iPad. 
  3. Insert and SD card into the card reader or in my case a Micro SD card. 
  4. The Photos app will launch and prompt you to do an import. 
  5. Import any of the videos you want and then choose to keep or delete them on the card. 
  6. Unplug the Lightning to USB adapter. 
  7. In the Photos app go to the “Last Import” album. 
  8. Tap the Select button to enable selection mode and select all of the videos. 
  9. Tap on the “Share” button (the box with the arrow coming out of it). 
  10. In iOS 11 tap on the “Save to Files” action and in iOS 10 select the “Upload to iCloud Drive” action. This will copy the file to iCloud Drive. 
  11. In the Photos app tap the Select button again and select all the videos and this time delete them. 
  12. Go to the “Recently Deleted” album and delete all the videos from Photos (just in case these would get uploaded to iCloud Photo Library).
  13. Now open up iMovie. 
  14. Create a new movie and import all of your videos from iCloud Drive. 
  15. Click Done to go to the Summary screen just to make sure everything is “Saved”.
  16. If you are using iOS 11 open up the Files app and if you are using iOS 10 open up iCloud Drive. 
  17. Delete all of the videos from iCloud Drive. 
  18. Go to the Recently Deleted view and also delete them from there. 
  19. Finally open the Settings app. 
  20. Go into the settings for the current user, which should be the top option. 
  21. In the user menu select iCloud. 
  22. In the iCloud menu you can choose which apps will save their data to iCloud. 
  23. Turn this off for the iMovie app. 
  24. Now turn off Airplane mode and you are ready to work on your movie. 
The iCloud Drive/Files storage part seems a bit excessive, but was necessary because any videos imported to iMovie from the iCloud Photo Library stop working if you delete them.  Importing from iCloud Drive/Files on the other hand puts a copy in the iMovie app’s local storage.

Adopting the iPad Lifestyle

I have been very interested in the ongoing discussion about the iPad-only lifestyle on all my favorite podcasts. It has made me think a lot about how I use my iPad and more importantly how I could be using my iPad for more tasks. A few weeks ago I bought a 9.7" iPad Pro with the intention of taking my iOS game to the next level. It has been an interesting experiment and has required me to rethink my usual workflow at both home and work.

The Dev Diary

The first thing to go was going to be my “Daily Dev Diary”. For the last few years I have been printing out a sheet of paper each day for keeping me on task and for keeping track of little things that happen during the day. Each morning I take my notes from the previous day, update the source document and then create the next day. The document has four sections to cover things I want to do over the long term, things I did yesterday, things I have to do today and random notes.

Migrating this process to include the iPad, was pretty easy once I settled on using Good Notes 4 as the primary note for note taking. I start by editing the master markdown document on my laptop and print the current day out to a PDF using Google Chrome. The PDF resides in OneDrive, which I use for all of my work file needs. I open up Good Notes 4 and import the document using the OneDrive integration. Once in the app I am able to use my Apple Pencil to markup the document as I had before. At the end of the day I export the document back to the OneDrive folder and voila it is ready for the next day. It was weird at first walking around with the iPad, but eventually it became natural and I don’t think I could go back to using the paper.

Secretary’s Day

One of my extracurricular activities involves being the secretary for the local youth baseball league, Merrimac Baseball. Due to my recent success with my dev diary, I thought it would be a piece of cake. I immediately ran into a problem with the first step in the process, duplicating an existing iCloud Drive document. I normally take the previous meeting minutes markdown file and make a copy, but there didn’t seem to be an easy way to do this in iOS. I opened up the iCloud Drive app, but it only provided me with a limited set of options. My markdown editor of choice, Byword recently added support for editing iCloud Drive documents, but I couldn’t figure out how to “Save As” or “Duplicate” the files. In the end I turned to Workflow for iOS and created a custom workflow that would let me select an iCloud Drive file and save it somewhere else. It took a few tries to get it right, but now I have it there to use whenever I need to copy a file. Once I duplicated the file it was all downhill from there, because I just used GoodNotes for my note taking.

After the meeting I had to transcribe my notes back into a markdown file, which I did using the new split screen feature in iOS 9. Byword had some problems displaying the full keyboard in split screen mode so that wasn’t great, but I did eventually figure it out. Finally after exporting the PDF to iCloud Drive I had to upload it to the baseball website. At first I wasn’t sure if it was possible, but once I clicked on the file chooser button on the web page in Safari, I was presented with my iCloud Drive directories and quickly found the PDF and added it to the site.

Learning the Ropes

So far the iPad lifestyle experiment has been successful for me because the device is so portable and I have found my original assumption about it being too much work to do things in iOS was flawed. There are definitely times when I have to put on my thinking cap and figure out the iOS way to do something, but in most cases it involves a simple solution, I will easily be able to apply in the future. I look forward to continuing this trend and expanding the amount of things I can do on this wonderful little device.