IPad Photo Transfer Very Slow....???

Normally photos are organized in iTunes on your computer. Are you doing this before transferring them over to the iPad? Also when photos are transferred from the computer to the iPad they are optimized for the iPad. This means they may be of a smaller file size than what was originally in your camera.

The iPad is really not meant to be used as you are using it. You might look at an alternative device like HyperDrive. That is a hard drive to which you can load and store your photos. The HyperDrive will connect to your iPad and you can use the iPad to work on specific photos and email them or upload them to websites.

I'd also be wary of transferring the photos and not having a second set on my camera's cards. When I travel I might load my photos to my laptop but I do not erase my cards until I get home and know I have the photos backed up on at least two hard drives.

I am not sure where movies shot with camera or video camera go. I am assuming they would all go into the Photos app on the iPad.

Have you tried just syncing your iPad the normal way in OS X?

Normally, if you have photos in the Photos app on iPad, iPhoto in OS X is supposed to open and it will ask you to import the photos to iPhoto from the iPad. I believe the same is true of the video. If video is stored in the Photos App on the iPad, it should sync and copy to the iPhoto app on Mac OS X.

Once imported, you can always access the original by going to your iPhoto library and either copy the data to a new location for editing (if using different photo editor) or for video, copy those to a new location for video editing, say, in iMovie, or some other video editor.

And I agree with the previous poster, leave the images stored on the cards that it writes to so you will always have an additional backup source of photos or videos in case something goes awry when you try to use your iPad.

The iPad is not really meant to be a portable, mass storage HD just to store tons of content for dumping to a computer later.

It's more a light applications/multimedia, ereading type of device. There are new portable HD's and WiFi portable HDs that you can have connected to an iPad for mass storage use.

Look at ones by Hyper Drive, Seagate or Western Digital.

Anyhoo... Try a normal iPad sync to see if it transfers normally instead of using Image Capture.

See if this works.

And yes, the transfer rate maybe slow, especially if you shot a lot of video and depending on the resolution you shot your photos in.

Good Luck!

I am also having the problem of files downloading from the iPad at slow speeds. I have even had the transfers lock up and fail completely, with some of the copied images being corrupt!

Awhile back when I was on Snow Leopard, I tried a method to get it to go fast again that involved turning off BlueTooth, disconnecting all USB devices, then restarting... then it went super-fast. But on Lion, I can't seem to get it to go very fast, maybe 15-20 MB/sec. maximum. Is that all I can realistically expect? Because at these speeds, downloading 40 or 50GB of images can take at least an hour!!

I have tried different computers and different cables to no avail. Tips?

Solved, see:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3618311?answerId=17174292022#17174292022

I’m astounded by some of the comments in this thread: “The iPad is really not meant to be used as you are using it” or “The iPad is not really meant to be a portable, mass storage”. Please tell me where I can find an authoritative description of how the IPad is meant to be used?

My use case is having photos going back to 1998 when I bought my first digital camera, and the IPad photo app is great for viewing pictures, it easily handles 25000+ photos, but only with one level of albums. I don’t sync any videos. Before syncing photos I arrange my photos having a folder per month named 2013-01, 2013-02 and so forth. It works very well, and when in doubt when we were on vacation in Paris, the photo album is a kind of memory documenting when we were where. I think it is a very valid use case.

But the process of syncing the photos from a harddisk to the IPad is painfully slow. I sync via ITunes on Windows 7 using selected folders (because there is not room for all photos on the IPad) and it takes forever. Even if I check only an additional folder having only a few new photos, it seems like ITunes starts all over rescaling all 25000+ photos once again! Typically the sync will have to run overnight at 100% CPU load before it completes! Apple should be able to do better than that, especially ITunes should do a ‘diff’ so that it only scales and transfers new photos added since last sync.