The iPad is a wonderful device for showing off content. Photos look great on the iPad display. While the native Photos App is good in a pinch it's lacking several features that photographers want and need. The biggest problem with it is that everything has to be done on your computer in terms of sorting images and putting them in albums (Apple why is this a limit?) Jason reviewed Portfolio for iPad a while back and while I have looked at SEVERAL apps in this category since then, it remains the closest App by a mile to what we want and need. The rest of the Apps are horribly bad! Most get the presentation aspect right, but fail miserably at the simplest of tasks such as getting images into the darn thing to begin with. Most rely on the images being in your camera roll and even then it's a painstaking one-by-one import. There was one App that I never could figure out how to get the images in. I can't believe that it's that hard to make a decent Portfolio App for iPad. I figure it's mainly because the developers are engineers, not photographers or end users. To make it easier I decided to put together a list:
What we want
If you're an app developer reading this and you're thinking about creating a portfolio app or fixing yours, don't bother releasing one or an update unless you've nailed these requirements:
- Ease of getting images in and more importantly updating them
- Ability to reorder images in the galleries in the app
- Multiple Galleries – A MUST!
- Slideshows with nice transitions, perhaps Ken Burns Effect, pan, zoom
- Slideshows with music – A MUST!
- Slideshows with text – basic text features in the app
- Slideshows that can include video
- Ability to overlay the video over stills in the background
- Slideshows that start off with a logo or other default image
- Slideshows that sync to the length of the song
- Slideshow that you can sync to the beat
- Ability to put two images side-by-side during the slideshow
- Ability to pinch and zoom when not running a slideshow
- Hiding/Locking
- Client Review Features
The Bottom Line
While Portfolio for iPad does have many of these features, it doesn't have them all and like I said it's the closest one to being what we need today. Their latest update offers Password protection of galleries, Image rotation (manual/automatic), PDF Navigation Links that are active and the ability to change the background of exported PDFs. There is so much potential in this category! I hope to see more contenders.
You can get Portfolio for IPad for $14.99 here from the 
I like Minimal Folio; the best so far for me.
I don’t own this app, but the comments for the latest version are not good. There are multiple complaints about crashes and bugs.
Dan … you will also notice that the developer has submitted a fix that has to go through the submission process … it will be released soon … these little bumps in the road pop up now and then and Portfolio has done a great job of improving and expanding capabilities over time … as well as responding to issues … I have full confidence that this latest hiccup will be rectified quickly … it’s a marvelous app …
I downloaded Foliobook this weekend, and it is doing the trick. Doesn’t knock my socks off, but it did what I needed it to do.