The iPad guide says that you can import them from your iPad to your computer by using a program "such as iPhoto or Adobe Elements." I don't know, but I guess that means there are other photo programs that will also do it.
You cannot write them back out to an external hard drive from the iPad. It's a one way street.
If you connect the iPad, however, the imported photos on the iPad show up in Aperture, Lightroom, Bridge, iPhoto etc for uploading to your computer.
Not a real solution for me. In the sense, that while traveling I take a Mac Book and upload from my Compact Flash/SD cards, delete the duds, rename and add meta data, and then write them back out to external drive(s) for backup. It's this last step that kills the iPad for my field work. The intermediate steps while not necessarily currently supported are not impossible to develop in an App. - whihc I have thought about looking into.
This is weird ... the iPad sync will take changed bookmarks and backpropagate them to your Safari on the iTunes server where you sync it ... why would they not be logically consistant and do the same ... pull any downloaded content and in some way push it up to the iTunes/Sync server, and photos should get added to iPhoto where you can export them to individual files if you like????
At the very least there should be some addressible content space where you could FTP them to some place on the network.
I'm thinking you also might be able to upload them to a photo site like FlickR ... have you tried that, like some stuff can go to Facebook/Twitter/....
I don't want a chance any of my personal data is going anywhere on the internet though, that's just me.
The other problem here, is that if you upload your photos to flickr or wherever , you still can't delete your photos from iPad without connecting to a computer. If I'm wrong, and someone knows a solution, I would sure like to know.
Thanks Steve, I'll try that. Don't have my camera kit yet, and apple support was no help. The online info only says you can delete from camera or card.