Moving Pictures and Video off your iPad

I highly recommend that teachers use their iPads for taking pictures and video. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing more slick than that! They take excellent still pictures and movies, and you can make anything a teachable moment. Take pictures of student work, good behavior, fun projects, silly moments, field trips, little stuff you want to make bigger (!), classroom guests, and so on. Take videos of students performing, children reading, field trips, great classroom behavior, and on and on and on.

But from there it can get a little sticky. My two options had been to email each individual picture (or video) to myself, upload the video to YouTube and then download it to my computer, or connect my iPad to my computer and transfer through iTunes. Transferring through iTunes doesn't work with our school iPads that are configured through Configurator, so that left only the email or upload to YouTube options. Both were a pain!

We are in the midst of a big project in our 2nd grade. Each student brought in a project. These, along with their explanation, are being recorded, photographed or videotaped and compiled into an electronic ABC Book using iBooks Author. This is a fantastic project and I am SO THRILLED to be going through this process. However, on Wednesday three teachers handed me iPads with over 100 pictures on each, and I realized I would have to email over 300 pictures individually to myself. This task was overwhelming, and I realized there had to be a better way!

After searching online for photo transfer tools, I ran across an app called PhotoSync. It is not free, but only costs $1.99, and I can install it on multiple iPads quickly, and remove it when I'm done if I need to. It is connected directly to my account, so any transfers I make I must make by logging in.

I installed the app on my own iPad first to test it out. There is also a free computer application (both Mac and PC) that needs to be installed. I added that to my computer, started both applications, and selected the photos I wanted to transfer. All 117 pictures on the first iPad transferred in about one minute. They went into a folder labeled with the iPad name, which made sorting them a breeze! This was one of those apps that worked perfectly, easily, seamlessly and predictably. I didn't have to read any directions ahead of time! I can't say enough how excited I am to find this app. It is one that I will be using and recommending over and over!

If you like watching videos and seeing how easy it is to use, here is one (of several) I snagged off of YouTube. Take a look  - and try PhotoSync out for yourself today!