So I've been helping someone set up an iPad (even though I'm not really qualified to do so), and there's an issue that's really annoying me.

See, she has a computer that she's not going to use going forward. She wants to put the photos from that computer onto her iPad. The problem I'm seeing is that there's no way to put the photos onto the iPad without syncing them. This means that if she wanted to delete ANY of the photos, she'd have to delete all of them because it's impossible to delete individual synced photos from the iPad its self, which is really annoying.

So how should we be doing this?

Without thinking deeply (so perhaps I should not be posting this), the first thing that comes to mind is to put the photos on an SD memory card.

Buy Apple's SD card reader adapter. Plug it into the iPad, import the photos.

I only buy MicroSD memory cards now, so I can use them in multiple ways. There are compact USB adapters for MicroSD (I use the tiny elago Mobile Nano II USB 2.0 microSDHC Flash Memory Card Reader) so copying from the old computer is straightforward.

Many MicroSD cards come with an included full size SD adapter for the MicroSD card, so plugging it into the Apple adapter for the iPad is also straightforward.

I have ordered the new SanDisc 128GB MicroSD card. Expensive, but when you need the space, you need the space

I ran into this when I got my iPhone, and before that, the iPod Touch.

There are a couple of third party products which will allow you to transfer photos to and from the iPhone/iPad without having to go through that weird "I WANT TO DELETE ALL YOUR DATA" thing that iTunes does.

In the past I have successfully used a product called Copy Trans Photo. It is for-pay; if you download the demo it will only allow low-rez watermarked transfers. The software itself is a bit clunky, and they do the thing where when they upgrade past a major dot version (which they do at regular intervals, about yearly I think at least), they make you pay again if you want the upgrade. However, the software did work to transfer photos, and when I submitted a support ticket to them about EXIF rotation, they fixed it in the next release. The last time I looked at it, though, it only did photos, not panoramas or videos.

Recently I have been experimenting with Disk Aid, which seems like a better product on the surface, but I haven't had a chance to spend much time with it. It does photos, panoramas, and videos, and the software looks less clunky. I have bought it, but haven't had any long term experience with its reliability. Also, I haven't actually tried using DiskAid to put photos *onto* the iPhone, I've only used to *retrieve* photos from the iPhone. I don't actually know if it will do that or not, it's not immediately clear from their web site.