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School use for Photography requires mass delete tool for photos on shared iPad3s

jonathan7007

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Sorry this has to be long to explain my question. Group use of iPads in school is complicated.

I teach photography to 140 4th and 5th graders in six classes on a single day. We use iPad3 units, because they provide the camera, viewing, editing, and storage all in one piece of equipment. Each iPad is shared by six students. We are using Photoshop Express (PE) as the application for all taking, editing, and saving photos. PE has a image capture button. I set Guided Access to keep each iPad "inside" PE for the entire day. There is no iTunes account for these students.

Students will pick one shot that exemplifies the goals of the lesson and upload by wifi to a album with their name code (not their real name) in Photoshop.com . (If the router in the computer cart can handle it.) Some will struggle with following all the steps. We have not been able to test the process in a real world scenario, which calls for all 24 kids navigating to their folder, picking the one image, and uploading -- all in the same five minutes. I want to evaluate their work, using Photoshop.com as a folder structure to see the images off-line.

That's not what I am writing to ask about, but I am open to ideas about how to do it differently.

Here's my problem:
As each student takes images they are placed in the Camera Roll. I wish I could keep these 6 collections separate during the day, but I can see no way to do this. They should not be fooling around with other kid's images but have access during the day to the growing set in Camera Roll. I tried to delete ALL the photos on each iPad (about 25 units) at the end of the day but I cannot see any way except to take many agonizingly inefficient steps on *EACH* iPad:

  1. Click the iPad out of Guided Access
  2. Switch to Photos at the home screen
  3. Touch Edit, and tap every single image. Some kids go nuts and take 50-60 images Maybe more.
  4. Touch Delete
  5. Confirm
  6. Open PhotoshopExpress again
  7. Place the iPad in Guided Access to lock it "inside" PE for next week's classes
  8. Repeat 26 times

My research tells me that if these units were hooked up to Windows Explorer I could do this. Not possible. The "cart" is designed as a iPad management tool for education environments. There is a MacBookPro that can write to every iPad through the charging/data cable that snakes down to the iPads. I don't think I can use the MBP to do the deleting…

So I hope someone knows of some app we can put on ALL the units to do the deleing with one click.

Or if there is another idea, please suggest it!


jonathan7007
 

twerppoet

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There is a small chance that deleting directly from the camera roll may cause problems over the long haul; but it sounds like the slight risk may be worth it for you.

The MacBook Pro should have an Image Capture app in the Application directory. It's a standard OS X app. You can use this to access the camera roll on the iPads. Selection is typical for OSX, but for some reason the only way to delete (that I can find) is the small red button near the bottom of the window.

Good luck.
 

Aquaticz

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i think you
could use MY Photo. you can make as many folds as ayou like. it does not affect camera roll since you import into this app. after importing you can delete from camera roll and still have all photos. you can also password protect each folder with a different password


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
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jonathan7007

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i think you
could use MY Photo. you can make as many folds as ayou like. it does not affect camera roll since you import into this app. after importing you can delete from camera roll and still have all photos. you can also password protect each folder with a different password

After research and experimentation: I was able to attach my Win7 laptop to an iPad through the USB data cable. I quickly navigated to the DCIM folder and either deleted or copied-then-deleted the student work to my laptop. Even this method was taking too long for the 26 machines (individually). The school stores, moves, and recharges the iPads in a specialized cart. Further, the "iPad Cart" incorporates a router for all the iPads' on-line access (the cart gets plugged into an ethernet cable in each classroom in which it is used.) I discovered that I could attach to this router through a USB connection on the outside of the cart, and that connection allowed my laptop to see ALL 26 iPads at once! So one by one in Windows Explorer I could erase or copy as needed from all the tablets loaded back in the cart after the day of teaching.

One reason working one by one tablet at a time is a big problem: I have locked all the iPads in Photoshop Express though Guided Access (GA) and to erase with a local tool means taking a LOT of steps:
>invoke release from GA
>tap in the four digit code to allow such release
>close Photoshop Express
>open "Photos"
>Tap Edit
>tap every single picture one by one
>tap delete
(often the iPad would leave one image even if all were tapped
>tap last image again
>close Photos
>open Photoshop Express
>invoke GA
attach data cable
>slide into small slot in cart so it will be charged and ready for the next lesson.
>start all the same steps in the next tablet.

Remember, I am teaching 140 kids and each tablet is shared by six kids during the photo teaching day. There are a lot of images in those machines.

Complicating this further are the students whose families do not want them to be *in* any pictures of any kind, and also don't want the photographs taken by their children to be *used* by the school for any purpose. But this isn't a "deletion" question, really. Just part of the real world of teaching.

jonathan7007
 

twerppoet

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I'm glad you found something that works. Thanks for letting us know.

About the only thing I could think of that would be better would be to script the procedure; though learning and creating a good script (if you have the tools) might be more trouble than it's worth.
 

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