Thursday 24 October 2013

Copying Photos to your iPad

A Fanboy's Lament

The sensible side of me resisted the iPad for so long. "What would I do with it?" I asked, sensibly. But once you've held one in your hot, little hands it's love at first sight. Resistance is futile. Like all love affairs, there is a dark side; the iPad only has a Lightning connector and I wanted to copy hundreds of photos from my camera.

The Apple Store will sell you a Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader but at a stonking 25 quid a pop it causes a sharp intake of breath. I don't know why I should be so mean when I'm looking at prices on the web while I am the world's worse retail victim when I'm browsing in the actual, physical Apple Store. I look at all their gadgets and gizmos and am happy, almost ecstatic, to find one I don't have and then eager to hand over wads of cash in return for a small, white plastic thing that may prove vaguely useful to me. Is this what they mean by being a "fanboy"?

The cheapo Lightning adapter
Or you can get one of these cheap plastic memory card readers on flea bay for a few quid. Very cheap plastic and nothing like as nice as proper, white Apple plastic.

And there's a trick to getting these adapters to work properly, you can't just shove them into your iPad and expect to copy your photos. You have to create a DCIM album on your iPad before you connect the adapter. DCIM (Digital Camera IMages if you must know) is a magic, reserved name in digital camera land as you've probably already noticed.

Making a DCIM album
So, fire up your iPad, go to your Photos app and choose Albums.  Tap the plus sign on the top left to create a New Album. Enter DCIM ("Dcim" works as well and I couldn't be bothered to test "dcim") then press Save. Slide your SD card into the card reader and plug the whole assembly into the Lightning connector. Wait 10 seconds or so and you will start to see thumbnails of all the photos stored on your SD card appear on your iPad screen.

Reading the SD card
Hum a happy tune while all the files are read and then press Import All. Your photos are imported into your Photostream, not your DCIM album. After that you can make your own albums and add photos from your Photostream. Leave your DCIM album empty.

I was using puny 2GB and 4GB SD cards and had no problems with reading the card. I would put serious money on these adapters not working with high capacity cards.

But I don't care; I'm not spending my pocket money on fancy-pancy, super-duper, high capacity SD cards. I'm saving up to buy a proper Apple card reader. A white one. Please don't tell anyone.







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