external hard drive question

[shamguess]

Complete ipad newbie here. In fact just looking into buying one. My parents are quite elderly but my mom still does email and basic internet searching. Their PC is near the end of its life span and I am thinking about getting my mom an ipad so she can so basic internet stuff. She no longer needs the power of a PC. Here's the kicker. She has many thousands of photos on the PC (gigabytes of photos from their many years of travels). I would like her to be able to view the images (no editing) on her ipad. I know they can be transfered to itunes or other cloud services but my mom is technically challenged and I know she would struggle with understanding what that meant. I would like to transfer all the images from the PC to and external hard drive that can then be read by and ipad. Can that be done? Will I have a formatting problem with the hard drive since I am copying from a PC and then reading on an ipad? Thanks for your help?

 

[Jupiter7]

It is perfectly feasible to transfer the photos to an external drive and then view them on an iPad from the Files App. You may need to buy an adaptor dependent on the connections of the drive and iPad and possibly use power according to the size of the drive. The USB drive needs to have only a single data partition, and it must be formatted as FAT, FAT32, exFAT (FAT64), or APFS.

 

[twerppoet]

Viewing photos in Files from an external hard drive is probably the easiest solution, but it’s not a great browsing experience. Importing those photos to Photos on the iPad is more of a hassle, and probably will mean hours recovering the organization, but it’s a great way to browse the photos once you are finished.

 

[LannyC]

It's pretty simple to use iTunes to transfer photos to the iPad. You'll need to set it up to sync only a selected folder, but that folder can contain subfolders and the organization will be preserved on the iPad. You don't need to mess with iPhoto, just a normal iTunes sync/backup. Her pictures will be in the iPad's photos app, each in its appropriate album. The order of photos in each album may not be maintained, though--how Apple sorts them is a mystery to me.

Note: I do this with my Mac. I presume it works the same in PC iTunes.

 

[twerppoet]

Photos sorts by the creation date in the photo’s metadata. If it is missing, it gives the photo a creation date the same as the date/time it is imported.

Photos taken with smart phones all have creation dates and location data (unless the feature is turned off).

Most digital cameras in the last 20 years assign a creation date to photos. That date is not always accurate, since the date/time ha to be set manually and can drift.

Most photos scanned will have creation dates from when they were scanned; though not always. Depends on the software used and the format of the file.

Albums you create yourself will be sorted in the order added. Unlike the Library and most other automatic albums, you can change the order by dragging photos around.

The Photos app does not have the ability to change the date/time data of a photo, however some utilities like Metapho do. It should also be possible to create a shortcut to batch change date/time data.