I recently purchased this iPad2 on the suggestion of a salesman at Best Buy after explaining what I needed. So far I haven't found a way to get it to do any of the things I was told it could do. I'm a photographer, and I need to be able to show clients copies of their proofs. I was sold an adaptor, and told I would be able to plug a zip drive into it and display photos stored in a folder on that drive. When I tried that I got a message that the drive required too much power. I connected an external hard drive and uploaded several gigs of photos, but now I can't find them. When I signed up for this for this forum I wasn't able to get the cursor to go into the message window. After about three hours trying many different things I changed the font to Georgia, and the cursor showed up in the message window. My daughter has an Asus tablet computer with the Android system and I have no trouble with it at all, I can plug my zip drive into it's built in USB port and dispay my photos without any problems. So what am I doing wrong?

The iPad USB port supplies only 10mA as opposed to the normal USB port of a PC, which supplies 300mA. You were not correctly informed; the iPad does not support a zip drive and only photographs can be downloaded from an attached SD Card or similar with sufficiently low power requirements.

Tim

If your daughter has a tablet that provides a complete solution to your problem, take your iPad back to the store and exchange it for a tool that works for you.

You would not try to shoot sports action shots with a portrait camera. Use the right tool for the job.

-t

I am with thewitt with this one, total agreement. Also the sales person gave you bad advice in best buy, i say return it asap and get the asus as you know that tablet works. Problem solved

Sent from my iPad using iPF, using iOS 4.3.2

I found the answer to one problem only to raise another issue. The iPad will only see a zip drive of 8 gigs or less. I had been using 16 gig drive. The pictures must be in a folder named DCIM, so the iPad will know they are photos.
So now I need to know how to put them into folders, so I can keep my client's pictured separate.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Folder management on the iPad itself in the stock photo app comes with iOS 5 in another month.

If you need it before then, there are lots of apps in the store for photo management.

-t