How to move huge #'s of pics to external HD?

[drrich2]

Hi:

I've thought about getting an iPad & bluetooth keyboard as traveling replacements for my wife's 15" Toshiba PC notebook. But on a recent scuba diving trip to Bonaire in the Caribbean, I did something with the Toshiba that from what I understand would be hard to do with an iPad.

My buddy & I took a few gigs of underwater (& above water) photos on 2 Bonaire trips this year. Some other members of our group wanted a copy of those photos. So, I simply did right click, new folder on the desktop, went to My Pictures, & copied the folders with those multiple gigs of pics into that new folder. Then I drug that folder onto my Western Digital Passport 500 gig external USB-2 HD, & loaned them the Passport to hook to their notebook computers & copy to their computers.

I'm under the impression that you can't do that with an iPad. There is a popular app., Drop Box, but the free version has around a 2 gig storage limit if memory serves, and you've got to copy files one-by-one (not an option with a few thousand photos). I get that there's a gadget for getting pics from SD cards to the iPad, but what about getting pics from the iPad to an external HD?

This this simply a task outside the iPad's practical capability, or am I missing an easy method?

Thanks!

Richard.

 

[poloponies]

You can also get a $5 USB SD card reader and transfer the photos to their PCS directly from the SD card and skip the whole step of transferring to/from a USB hard drive.

 

[seajay96]

AFAIK, there is no way to transfer from the ipad directly TO an SD card or external HD. As poloponies says above, a simple usb card reader is fairly easy, especially since that's how you got them onto the iPad in the first place.

However, you can take your iPad to your friends computer and:

Windows (Win7): If you plug your iPad in, it will give you the same prompt you get for a camera and from that prompt you can open a folder that contains all of the photos on the iPad. It's not well organized, all of the folders are named "803AAAA" or something to that effect, but the photos are all there and you can just drag and drop to the host PC.

If the guest computer is a Mac, there are a number of 3rd party solutions that allow you to mount the iPad as a USB drive and view files.

 

[drrich2]

Thanks, guys. The SD cards get cleared between dives and by the time someone says 'Hey, can I have a copy of your pictures?,' just loaning out the SD card is no longer an option.

But hooking the iPad to a computer can be (albeit not as elegant as I'd hoped). That's good to know.

Especially since I'd want to move the pics to my desktop MacPro once we get back home.

Richard.

 

[poloponies]

Thanks, guys. The SD cards get cleared between dives and by the time someone says 'Hey, can I have a copy of your pictures?,' just loaning out the SD card is no longer an option.

But hooking the iPad to a computer can be (albeit not as elegant as I'd hoped). That's good to know.

Especially since I'd want to move the pics to my desktop MacPro once we get back home.

Richard.

As cheap as SD cards are today, just buy more.

 

[saberahul]

Well I just upload all my pictures to shutter fly application. They don't have a limit to how much space you take and then I just send a public link to whoever I want. Or I create a private torrent and give that out. Or I zip it and upload to megauploader and give that out. All for free.

 

[bassanoclapper]

I wonder if Phonedisk works for iPad. Heard about it this week but have yet to try it. Effectively, it shows your device in Disk Mode

 

[seajay96]

I wonder if Phonedisk works for iPad. Heard about it this week but have yet to try it. Effectively, it shows your device in Disk Mode

yes, it does.

 

[beejam]

This is a little different solution, but if you have access to their computers (instead of loaning a hard drive), you can use Photo Transfer to copy through a web browser directly to their computer. I've used this program since first getting my iPad and it works great. (And I don't work for or know anyone at this company. Just a satisfied user.)
http://www.phototransferapp.com/

-Brian