Professional photographers who own an iPad and have seen that lightweight photo editing is possible on the tablet have been asking for a portable version of Apple’s Aperture software for quite some time now. While there’s no evidence that Apple is working on a native iPad version of Aperture with focus on the OS X audience and the Mac App Store (where Aperture is being sold at a nice discounted price), third-party developers have set out to create alternatives to the most popular “pro” Apple apps like Final Cut and, indeed, Aperture.

Pixelsync, previously known as “Tagalicious”, is a new app by developer Bart Jacobs that can sync Aperture photos between the iPad and the Mac. With a minimal and elegant interface (that’s dramatically improved since the first version of the app which, frankly, was quite ugly) that resembles the default Photos app, Pixelsync needs to communicate with a “helper” software users will have to install on their OS X machine running Aperture. Pixelsync Helper will than make it possible for the iPad app to fetch photos from the desktop application.

In Pixelsync for iPad you can’t edit photos, but you can play around with the metadata. Put simply, you can rate photos and assign color labels. Once projects and / or albums have been imported, you can edit and organize these data on the iPad and then sync back to Aperture. It all happens wirelessly with no USB cable required.

At $5.99 in the App Store, Pixelsync might be a little too pricey; still, Aperture users who have been looking for a lightweight iPad companion should give it a try.