Best Tablet for Photo Editing in 2026: A Photographer’s Verdict

I’ve been shooting travel photography professionally since 2010, and in that time I’ve bought into the tablet-as-editing-machine idea twice. Both times I ended up back at my desktop. Things have moved on a lot since then, and the tablets in this guide are far better machines than either of mine were, but my position hasn’t changed much. A tablet is a great second machine for editing photos. It’s a bad choice for your only one. My first tablet experience was an original Dell XPS 12 in 2013. This was a very funky device, a laptop with a convertible flippable screen. It ran Windows, on which I ran Lightroom. The second tablet experience I had was an HP tablet in the spring of 2015, which I edited on with whatever I could get to run on it, which was not a lot. Neither stuck. The HP was underpowered enough that I didn’t keep it long. And with both of them, the business of getting photos onto the thing and then back off again was never worth the trouble when a far more capable machine was sitting at home waiting for me. I’ve written guides to the best laptops for photo editing and the best desktop computers for photo editing off the back of actually using them for work. So I want to be u...