How To: Move Photos from a Computer to an iPad without iTunes

One of the biggest dilemmas for those who have Apple products is the fact that you don’t seem to be able to do everything you want to do with it. For example, with the iPad you have a camera connector accessory which allows you to connect your camera to the iPad via USB and copy photos across reasonably easily. So you think to yourself, this should work if I plug a USB stick directly into it and copy photos from my computer across to the iPad. But it isn’t as easy as you first think, there is a process which you have to follow before this can be done which I will show you in this article.

The iPad can recognise USB flash drives through the camera connector but can only import photos and videos through it. In order to achieve this you need to trick the iPad into thinking that you have connected a camera directly so as to import the photos.

What you need:

• An iPad
• A USB Camera Connector kit for iPad
• A USB Flash Drive
• A Computer – preferably with Windows (not essential)
• Bulk File Rename Utility

What to Do:

1. First, get everything you need together

2. Now find the photos you want to copy over on your computer and put them in one folder. The iPad will only recognise the photos if the file name is exactly 8 characters which should be fine if the photos are copied from your camera and haven’t been renamed. If you have renamed your files to something different, don’t panic! A simple utility exists which can rename your files easily. If you open Bulk Rename Utility and navigate to the folder where you kept your photos, you get a screen like this:

Click for Full Size

3. Although the screen look complex, its pretty easy if you make sense of it. First highlight the photos you want to rename, go to the Remove box and change the value of “First n” until the original file name is removed ( a live preview is shown next to the original file name). On the Add and Numbering box, make the values the same as shown in the above picture (click it to make it bigger). This will give you a file name that is 8 characters long.

4. The point of this exercise is to trick the iPad into thinking that the USB stick you have plugged in is a camera so the next step is to plug your USB stick into the computer and create a new folder called DCIM

5. Now create a sub folder inside the DCIM folder and call it PANA_100 (this is what my camera usually calls the sub folder in the memory card)

6. Now copy the files you just renamed into the sub folder

7. Finally, the last step is to remove the USB stick containing the photos and connect it to your iPad like so:

  The iPad should open the Photos app and show you the pictures on the USB stick under Camera. If this does not show up, try turning the iPad off and then back on again. You should eventually get a screen like this:

Now it’s a simple matter of importing the photos and you’re done!

It’s a process which is way more complicated than it needs to be but it can be done. This will save you the hassle of using iTunes to sync the photos (which takes forever if you have over 1000 photos) and make it so much easier to use the digital photo frame feature of the iPad and share photos with your friends.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.