Photos on an iPad

Thank you all for taking the time to advise/comment.

I'm reasonably sure we can now get a satisfactory solution.

If not, - well I've still got the pics

thanks
Bernard

I think this will do it for you Bernard, the free version of Diskaid (iPhone, iPad etc.) and it works on both Mac & PC :

http://www.digidna.net/products/diskaid

Bernard, I really can't understand why this thread has now run to 3 pages, unless I'm missing something really fundamental! Forget all about clouds, cables, uploading, email and so on.

Apple used to bundle a CDROM of iTunes with their 'i' products but now they, rightly, expect you to download it from their website. One of the great delights IMO is that they are so intuitive they dont need a manual.

What on earth is your wife using her iPad for? Without iTunes it is as much use as a spent match! The iPad is basically just an iPod Touch on steroids or a big iPhone without telephony, without iTunes you CANNOT sync anything. As I said, the iPad is just a mirror of iTunes on your computer.

Once you have iTunes running dont hesitate to ask for any more advice.

The fundamental problem is that Apple networking doesn’t talk nicely to windows networking. But some kind of external network attached storage would probably sort out the translation for you.

I would, however, warn you to stay away from iTunes; on windows it easily qualifies as crapware and borders on malware, with the notorious Bonjour “service” the worst culprit for screwing up windows functionality.

Dropbox on the other hand is a good alternative and should sync over you network.

Why not :

Android tablets have USB ports.

Apple make an adapter allowing the use of a USB connection.

Exactly - why would Apple give you standard connectivity if they can charge you extra for a gadget to provide it.

Yep, I have an iPad, and don't want iTunes cluttering up my pc. Doesn't work very well, and breaks all the file associations.
Anyway, I bought the camera interface. For about 25 quid you can then plug in an sd card directly, or the camera itself through a USB cable.
The frustrating thing is that it's all or nothing, picking the specific pictures you want to copy to the iPad is painful. Like most things apple, it's good if you want to do exactly what apple intended you to do, a pain in the bum if you don't.

I have both pictures and receipes stored on a NAS drive and use this app to access them on the iPad: http://www.ephotozine.com/article/air-sharing-universal-ios-app-review-17847

Update.

We've still virtually no further than we did back in January.

I've downloaded and run/failed to run no end of Apple stuff on my PC.
My wife has no end of apps free/paidfor on her iPad.

The photographs/recipes etc remain firmly on my PC and apart from a purty screen, Gartmores "spent match" comes to mind.

Latest is to have dropbox running on each device. Sofar so good.
I've transfered files into dropbox and my son (also a PC user) can access/download pics/pdfs, so the theory works sofar.
iPad seems determined not to play ball.

As an aside query - how do I shrink photographs when I transfer them to the dropbox folder. My son complains that 3-5MB is tooooo big.

regards
Bernard

I said it before and I'll say it again - and you seem to have found it works

DROPBOX.

I'm just back from a week in Dublin - took about 40 pics [ mainly liturgical so I'm not posting them .]

I downloaded to the Pad using the SD Card adapter and they appeared miraculously in PHOTOS, BUT I found editing them was a total pain - so plonked iPhoto on and put the pics in that - it allows a decent amount of editing but the photos are now [ I did not delete them from the card ] on my Aperture Library [ an external drive] and are now decently edited. I'm still not confident using iPhoto on the Pad but I'll get there.

Bernard - are you able to get to an Apple Store ? The staff will take her individually and help her problem solve and I suspect it will be a lot easier that way . I went into an iPad workshop and was told at that just to bring the baby in and staff would help - and they did - I had to do a System change on the MacBook Pro and also move to the Cloud - and they hand held me through it .

And yes - documents are a pain as the Pad doesn't recognise Open Office , Neo Office or even M$S Office - it wants docs as Apple's own pages. As you have seen PDFs are the way to go for getting docs onto the Pad and managing to read them .

Now we know that, it's easy to cope with - type document on either my MacBook Pro in Neo-Office /M$S Office and then export as PDF and pop in the DropBox - it's then read in London no problem . He writes a doc on his Linux based lappy - exports to PDF and pops it in the DropBox and it's there on the Pad for me to read , and believe me we did 48 page bilingual documents like that and I was reading them offline

Sorry to rain on your parade TT but we haven't cracked it yet.

As I said the iPad still doesn't want to play.

We're obviously doing something wrong, but what?

Bernard

You don't need a cable.

http://ipadinsight.com/ipad-tips-tricks/how-to-setup-wi-fi-sync-for-the-ipad-in-...

Oh by the way.
So far :-
Put a load of jpgs into dropbox from my PC :-

I've invoked the share function in dropbox. Opening DB on the iPad, there's nothing there

I've emailed a DB link to my wife and see can see the items (so far so good) but unable to copy them to anywhere on the ipad.


All see wants are pictures of our grandchildren to show off (note - the iPad we have apparently doesn't permit wandering so the pics need to be on board)


Bernard