Thanks for the reply, Dave. You have offered some good suggestions.
I do have both a desktop and a laptop computer here. They, along with a couple of printers, and all of our IPhones & iPads can be interconnected on a wireless LAN, using a Cisco router. Problem is, I haven't even turned on the big computers in more than a year. The iPads have completely replaced them here. The only Internet access I have is via Verizon cellular LTE and an expensive data plan. (got rid of Hughesnet because it was terrible.)
The pictures which were on my iPad came from a variety of sources: airdropped from iPhones, downloaded, saved from other apps like PS Touch and Snapseed, e-mailed, and transferred from my laptop using iTunes years ago. I disliked iTunes software so much that I just quit using it.
My only back-ups have been occasionally to iCloud. When my iPad 3 recently dropped dead, I made a very successful restore from iCloud to my new iPad air. It retained all of my documents, photos and detailed data from each app. I was delighted. I expect I can recover my photos from iCloud, but I don't yet know how without doing a complete restore.
It never occurred to me that the Apple native photo app would screw up. Looks like mine is corrupted because it sits there saying it's downloading something, but it's constipated. Don't know what to do about this situation. Can't delete and re-load the app, since it's native. After I post this note, I will try a reset to see if that cures the problem.
The Air Stash device that you mentioned looks very interesting. I'll check into that. Meanwhile, I may have to go make up with iTunes and the laptop. I don't want to back up photos on my iPad for storage space reasons and the fact that iPads can drop dead.
If anyone can tell me how to restore just my Photos from iCloud I'd be appreciative.
Larry Cruzen