I bought my mom an ipad, she's never taken to computers but i think the ipad will be fun for her. I've loaded it up with hundreds of albums/photos of all her grandkids, but she doesn't live anywhere near any of us (her kids). Is there a simple way that I could share or send a photo album/folder to my mom from my computer and have it download to her ipad, and appear as an album in the photos app, just like all the other photos? ideally i'd need a way to do this on a mac and on windows. thanks!
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Bought my mom ipad, best way to share photos with her?
- Thread starter qwimjim
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The easiest way I have found is if you both have mobile me then you can use the free gallery app and share the photo albums you select.
That's what I would suggest too. Just get her to use the MobileMe Gallery app instead of the Photos app and just share albums with her.
I'm sure MobileMe works great but you both would have to pay for it I'm pretty sure to do the photo sharing. Maybe I'm wrong.
Your best free bet is an online photo upload site like Flickr. You both have to join then you can create private albums granting her permission to see them.
Your best free bet is an online photo upload site like Flickr. You both have to join then you can create private albums granting her permission to see them.
yeah the problem is it's mostly going to be my sister that has photos to share and she has a windows machine. also flickr is no good, i want her to be able to view the photos along with all her other photos and not have to browse a slow website downloading each photo individually each time. also it seems photosync is only good for transferring photos between devices on the same wifi network, unfortunately she will be 1000 miles away
Having a windows machine has nothing to do with sharing photos (Oh maybe you are talking about the Photosync app). I would not say that flickr is a slow web site. I've used the Flickr app on my iPhone and it works pretty well and fast. Any which way you do it she will have to download or access photos over the web. Just think Flickr should be an option then you and your sister can upload photos and your mom will be able to easily access them with the flickr app.
Dropbox is a great idea. You can create a "shared" folder which she can access. It's a great app for saving anything to the ipad, but she would still have to access it while online. It's a simple "point and click" operation that would transfer all her pictures to her iPad album, but once downloaded, she could look at them any time, whether online, or out and about, (I am sure she wants to brag about her Grandkidlets with her friends.)
so basically i would drag and drop albums into this shared dropbox folder, and dropbox would automatically download them to a local folder on her ipad? it just needs to be really simple or she won't use it 
with photos automatically update and display albums from within that dropbox folder on her ipad or would they need to be moved? thanks guys!
with photos automatically update and display albums from within that dropbox folder on her ipad or would they need to be moved? thanks guys!I use Dropbox for this and it works really well. I have a shared folder where I drop the photos and our family all over the world gets access. I've been amazed at the speed with which I can take a video on the iPhone, upload it directly to Dropbox via the DB app, and then get an email from people overseas about it.
This could be a common problem for those of us who try to give an iPad to our non-computerized parents who live far away.
For one thing, Apple has no OTA operating system updates, so unless you go visit, they'll never get updated.
For another, without someone there to hold their hand the first few days, iOS can be quite confusing. (E.g. the first time my mother held her finger down on an icon, and they all started jiggling. Unfortunately, that's not an expected result at all.) People who claim iOS is easy for kids and old people, have forgotten that they were there to help out new users at first. Even sliding between homescreens is not an intuitive action to have done on your own, unless you already knew that action existed.
Then there's the lack of Flash support. We would send her emails pointing to Flickr slideshows or some video uploads, and she'd just get blank spots. Drat.
So I put an iOS Flickr app on there she can use, but if the password ever expires, it's a pain to walk her through it again.
Anyway, I loaded her up with pictures as well, and then realized it was going to be nearly impossible to load more on there for her. If someone finds a way to push pics to an iPad's picture album OTA, that would be great.
For one thing, Apple has no OTA operating system updates, so unless you go visit, they'll never get updated.
For another, without someone there to hold their hand the first few days, iOS can be quite confusing. (E.g. the first time my mother held her finger down on an icon, and they all started jiggling. Unfortunately, that's not an expected result at all.) People who claim iOS is easy for kids and old people, have forgotten that they were there to help out new users at first. Even sliding between homescreens is not an intuitive action to have done on your own, unless you already knew that action existed.
Then there's the lack of Flash support. We would send her emails pointing to Flickr slideshows or some video uploads, and she'd just get blank spots. Drat.
So I put an iOS Flickr app on there she can use, but if the password ever expires, it's a pain to walk her through it again.
Anyway, I loaded her up with pictures as well, and then realized it was going to be nearly impossible to load more on there for her. If someone finds a way to push pics to an iPad's picture album OTA, that would be great.
So it looks like the mobile version of dropbox (iphone, ipad) do not automatically sync folders, you can make individual files as "favorite" and they will automatically be synced but not folders. In this case I would need a folder to be synced so I could just drop in sub-folders with new photos.
Has anyone gotten this to work another way? This does not seem to be a workable solution. As far as keeping the ipad up to date, she visits one of us every 4-5 months so that isn't a problem.
Has anyone gotten this to work another way? This does not seem to be a workable solution. As far as keeping the ipad up to date, she visits one of us every 4-5 months so that isn't a problem.
Not sure what you are saying. In dropbox, you just 'drop' files into a folder (aka box) on your PC/Mac and it syncs everything in there with all your devices.
You can have multiple PC/Mac/iPhone/iPad or any number of supported devices and all files in your 'dropbox' will be synced automatically. Most of the time its instantaneous...
While Dropbox doesn't automatically push file and folder changes to an iPad, any changes you make will show up next time your Mom opens the Dropbox app.
How often will your Mom take the iPad out of the house? Since all the currenly avaiable solutions seem to require the photos to be stored on the Internet, perhaps you could get her a 3G iPad? That way, she could still access the pictures while she's at a friend's house, for example.
Dropbox only updates the file listing when you open it, but the files themselves are not updated or downloaded automatically to the mobile device. Files are downloaded individually when you open them, one at a time. The only way to have the files automatically downloaded/updated and stored on the mobile device is to mark them as favorites, but you can't mark a folder as a favorite so that doesn't solve my particular problem because I need -new- files to be downloaded automatically, all at once. There are thousands of requests for this feature on the dropbox forum going back almost 18 months, I'm not holding my breath
The alternative with dropbox is she can just go to dropbox.com and view the photos in the folder as online galleries, which is certainly easier than setting up flickr galleries , but still.. it's hard to believe there isn't a way to sync folders on the ipad.
It does not, it syncs everything with devices that use the desktop client but it does not sync everything with mobile devices (iphone/ipad). When you access your dropbox folder on your mobile device it just lists the files in the dropbox folder and shows their size and when they were last updated. but it has not downloaded anything. It only downloads the files one at a time when you open them, to save bandwidth. The mobile dropbox client was only designed to view files in your dropbox folder, it is not meant to sync your dropbox folder like the desktop client does.
I have mobileme and had my mom install the app on her ipad. She signed in as me and she sees all the photos i upload.
It's not slow at all (moms only has wifi ipad).
Good luck with all these other super complicated solutions but trust me, mobileme app is the way to go.
It's not slow at all (moms only has wifi ipad).
Good luck with all these other super complicated solutions but trust me, mobileme app is the way to go.
Because I don't want to
I want the photos to be on the ipad, along with all her other photos, without the sluggishness that comes with viewing photos online.
Because I don't want to
Then there's no way to do that. But I use both a Flickr app and MobileMe Gallery app and it's not slow at all, it's nothing like seeing the photos on a website.
Because I don't want to
Have you tried the app? I don't have flickr, but I have photo bucket, and the speed is amazing. On a wifi connection, it feels almost as if the photos are right on the iPad.