iPad: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. View and Manage Photos

With its big glossy screen and wide black border, you could easily mistake the iPad for one of those digital picture frames designed to sit on the mantle and let proud parents show off an ever-running slideshow of their kids and pets. The iPad is no imposter here—it can serve as a digital picture frame when you want it to. But it can also do so much more.

The thin little iPad can replace stacks and stacks of paper-based photo albums. It can show your photos on a map, based on where you shot them. It lets you email your favorite snaps to friends. And with the right kind of audio-video cable, it can even play your pictures on the big screen for the whole room—making it the Kodak Carousel of the 21st century.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when your friends see what you can do with photos on the iPad, you may hear a few thousand more.

Get Pictures onto Your iPad

The iPad can display your handsome photographs in most of the file formats digital cameras use, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and even those large, uncompressed RAW files favored by serious photographers who don’t want to squish a pixel of precious image data. But to show them off on the iPad, you have to first get them on the iPad. There are several ways you can do that.

Transfer Photos with iTunes

If you keep your digital photo collection organized in programs like Adobe Photoshop ...