Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

At long last the iPad Camera Connectivity Kit showed up last Tuesday. It consists of two separate adapters. One allows you to plug a standard USB cable into an iPad; the other accommodates an SDHC memory card. It is intended to allow you to import images from your camera into your iPad.

This is what I’d been waiting for, right? A way to upload images without being forced to create a duplicate set of files on a host computer. I immediately located a fallow 4GB SDHC card and copied about one thousand images to it. They were contained in 36 separate folders.

With excited apprehension I plugged the card reader into my iPad and inserted the SD card. What I expected to happen next didn’t. I expected to upload 36 folders full of images.

Instead I was greeted by a pop-up error message that said “Attached Device is Not Supported.”

I tried again, thinking maybe I’d managed to slip things in upside down but received the same message.

“A ha,” I muttered. “It’s looking for a card that’s been written to by a camera,” I surmised. So I inserted the card into the reader on my desktop PC, created a folder called DCIM and moved all of the image folders to that folder.

It worked—sort of. This time when I reconnected the SD card reader to the iPad it found the DCIM folder and allowed me to upload the images. It took a long time, but hey—there were a lot of images—946 in all.

When it finished I expected to find 36 folders—“Albums” in iPad-speak—all neatly arranged. Nope. I found two new folders, one called “All Imported” and the other “Last Import.” I also found that under the “Events” tab, the iPad had arranged all of the images by date, stacking neat little piles of those taken on the same day. Curiously, however, the latest date it shows in July 25, 2008. The latest images I uploaded were taken in December of 2009. Something isn’t working right.

I suppose the folks at Apple would say that I attempted to make the Camera Connectivity Kit do something it was never built to do, and they would be correct. The kit allows you to move images directly from a digital camera to an iPad. Period.

Is the iPad an awesome device? Like any tool, it depends on what you’d like to do with it. Silly me, I thought I’d be able to upload, sort, browse and display digital images—on my own terms. There’s probably an app that will allow me to do so, but I haven’t found it yet.