Recover photos from iPad to Windows?

[Q-Eye]

I recently suffered a catastrophic failure of my Windows desktop hard drive. I had a backup that was a couple of months old but it did not include the photos in the My Pictures folder for my last vacation. Previously, I had synced to my iPad2 and my ipodTouch so all of the photos are on those two devices (obviously at reduced resolution) but not on my new PC's hard drive.

I am afraid to sync my i-devices to the new PC at this point for fear of losing the photos from the i-devices thus having them gone forever. I don't think that connecting to the PC in iTunes is going to "backup" the full contents of the i-device to windows. And then if I "sync", since the pics are not on windows, I'm afraid that itunes will delete them from the device.

Is there a way to get the photos back onto the PC short of emailing a hundred+ photos to myself from the iPad?

Suggestions most cordially and gratefully accepted...

[lelisa13p]

I know for sure that this will work. I bought the Camera Connection Kit as soon as it was available last year because I had photos on my previous iPhone and on my iPad and needed a way to consolidate all photos to both devices and PC and couldn't take a chance on iTunes mucking anything up. The cost is $29 but it was worth it to me. Plug in and then copy to PC, leaving photos on devices or not, the choice is asked of you when copying is finished.

HTH.

BTW, always set iTunes to NOT open when device is detected.

[Q-Eye]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! (Please add about 997 more of those...)

I actually did buy the camera kit when I bought my iPad so I do have that. I haven't used it much and forgot about the possibility of recovering the photos that way. I'll give it a try as soon as I get home tonight.

You're a life saver (and I don't mean one of those round holey things)!

Phil

[brickman65]

What lelisa13p is the best and easiest IMO. You may also consider some type of Cloud storage. (I know that is a "dirty" word around here but it works!)

I use Box.Net but there are tons! DropBox, SmugHub, Flicker.etc. Many are free. I use both the cloud AND an External Drive that I will "dump" my iPhoto Library into every so often. I got a 1TB on sale at Staples for like $50! Well worth it.

[Q-Eye]

I have dropbox and a 50GB box account now. I did see that with box at least, there are severe restrictions of the number and size of files that can be uploaded at one time. I do think I'll be restructuring my backup habits!

[lelisa13p]

Oh, Happy Day!

And you don't even have to spend any more $$$.

[Q-Eye]

Well I have bad news and good news.

First the bad news. I tried the camera adapter and either didn't get it connected right or don't know quite how to use it. The only pics I could see on my device(s) were pics that were in the "Camera Roll" or pics that I had previously imported via the adapter. I couldn't see the pics that had gotten there through the iTunes sync.

The good news is that I found a GREAT little free app called "WiFi Photo Transfer" that allowed me to transfer all of my missing pics, up to 100 at a time in a zip file, to my PC. It's really pretty cool. No cables required, just a wifi connection. The app actually creates a little temporary web server on the device that you use to copy single or multiple pics from any browser on your local network. Very fast and got the job done without any problems.

I may experiment some more later with the camera adapter to see if I was just not smart enough last night but in the meantime, I've got PICS!

[Varjak]

I refrained from commenting yesterday, because I didn't want to appear more cranky than I usually do; but this is exactly why Apple's 'no ports, no card slot' philosophy is BS.

[weegie]

What's wrong with just using windows explorer to copy and paste from the ipad to your PC without using iTunes?
I would change the setting for automatically start iTunes before connecting the device though, and probably make a copy of the copy of the pictures on the PC until I was sure it was all going to play nice through iTunes first

[Q-Eye]

Windows explorer can only see the pictures in the "camera roll", not any of the albums that were transfered to the ipad via iTunes sync. At least that's what I think I saw.