Like many of us, Eric Jacobs has parents and those parents are confounded by iPad photo management. He writes:
My parents bought an iPad last year to use primarily when traveling, for email, and particularly to manage the photos they shoot. But the process is confusing. Can you shed some light on how this is supposed to work?
I don’t blame your parents for their confusion. The iPad’s Photos app isn’t as intuitive as it could be. Here are the basics on managing photos.
When you attach the iPad Connector Kit adapter to the iPad and then import photos, those photos are imported into two albums—Last Import and All Imported. You don’t have the option to import them into a different album on import. However, you can create a new album and then copy the images to that album.
To do that, within the Photos app tap the Albums tab, tap the Edit button in the top-right corner of the iPad’s screen, and then tap the New Album button in the top-left corner. Name the album and tap Save. In the resulting screen you see Add Photos to nameofalbum and, by default, all the photo events currently on your iPad (you also have the option to choose Albums, Photo Stream, and Photos). Tap an event or album and you see all the images within it. You can select them all by tapping Select All Photos or tap individual images to select each one. When you’re happy with your selection, tap Done and the images are copied into your new album.
To later add or remove images from the album, tap the album to open it, tap the Share button in the top-right corner, and in the Select Photos screen tap Add Photos to go through a process similar to the one I just outlined or tap on images you want to delete and then tap Remove. If you’d like to copy images between albums, tap that same Share button, select the images you want to copy, tap the Copy button, move to a different album and open it, tap on an empty area within that album, and tap Paste. The images will now also appear in that album as well as remain in the original album.
So, you can do much of what you might want to, but it’s not an entirely intuitive process. Personally, I’ve given up on Photos for much of my iPad photo management and turned instead to Linkus’ $3 Photo Manager Pro. It does Photos one or two better by providing such features as the ability to move rather than simply copy images, lets you password protect albums, provides the opportunity to transfer files via FTP or view and download images from a web browser, includes a Favorites feature for marking and viewing your images as exactly that, and lets you rate your images from one to five stars. If you’re unsatisfied with the Photos app, give Photo Manager Pro a go.