Tap on the files you want to transfer, tap where you want them sent. Meh.
I’ve had several chromebooks over the last 10 years and multiple android devices and they have all just been “plug and play” as far as external drives and connections to PC’s are concerned.
Well, the iPad is too for the most part. If you connect a flash drive physically to the iPad, it should show up in the iOS Files app just fine.
I just read a review of the MediaShare and it says you can only access the files using the dedicated app, so if that’s true, it’s really a Verbatim problem, not an iPad problem. The fact that the MediaShare Wireless app hasn’t been updated in over 4 years doesn’t help either.
edit- Also, your work won’t let you connect a drive physically to the iPad, but you’re allowed to connect one wirelessly?
yep, though my shared drives on my home network are off limits I can access the ad-hoc version offered by verbatim. Go figure.
Also, There are several other apps for the ipad that have specific folders that are accessible through the app but not through the standard file manager so it does seem to be a fairly common approach, though a very annoying one.
I’ve given it “the finger” and it didn’t help.
The biggest annoyance I have with iPadOS is that fucking built-in Photos app. It is a huge pain in the ass to work with, impossible to organize (or at the very least takes way too much effort) and the worst part is that its content does not show up in Files app. It is like Apple took everything they learned from iTunes and asked, “How can we make this suck even more than that?”
Although I agree that Photos is pretty suboptimal in a multitude of ways, not making the file structure of the photos in Files is not one of them. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the Files app, which is not to act as a global file access structure the way it is in Unix (and copied by DOS, Windows, Linux, et cetera); the Files app is specifically for accessing files that you need to upload and download outside of a particular application. For the most part, iOS apps are intended to maintain their files in an internal sandbox both for general security (a file cannot be easily accessed by another app where it may exploit a system vulnerability) and to prevent the messy collection of often abandoned files that is found in the ‘Documents’ folder of most users.
Since most files are only accessed by one specific application anyway (PDFs by a PDF reader, Word files by Word, Excel files by Excel, et cetera) it isn’t really necessary that they be in one general pot of files, and if you do need to share them between applications then you can either send them directly to that application (if the applications have interoperability) or to Files for general access. In the case of Photos, if you want to access the files of some specific pictures, say to run some kind of Python filtering script on them or to bundle them into a zip file, or whatever, you can click the Export (square with an up arrow icon), scroll down to “Send To” and select Files (or Box, or Dropbox, or whatever file sharing app or service). Since the vast majority of people using tablet machines just use apps primarily for consumption or simple, single application workflows, this isn’t even a necessary feature for general users, but if you do need to do this the functionality is there.
And contrary to the notion that tablets are only for consumption and that users cannot do actual workflows on them, I’ve been using my iPad Pro for Python hacking for the past year using the Juno (Jupyter Lab) application, and it has actually become my primary machine for that purpose. It is not a replacement for a more powerful desktop workstation machine when it comes to running numerically intensive scripts but it is increasingly faster and easier to just run those on a remote server that has fantastically more power than any standalone workstation or even my small computing cluster.
Stranger
PEBFAK.
nitpick: PEBFAC
There’s a reason the central repository idea for documents exists, though. There are often multiple apps that can handle the same type of file. Having to manually share between apps is a huge amount of work, wasting a ton of time. And I don’t see any reason that someone wouldn’t pile up a bunch of unused documents inside of the various programs. And now it’s worse, since there’s no central place to go through and try to clean things up.
There’s a reason Android compartmentalizes but still provides a safe way to access files directly if necessary. Apple, in their typical arrogance, loves to try and force people to do things a certain way, rather than letting people find the way that works best for them.
There definitely should be some way for there to be a files app that can see everything, and an easy way to set things up where you can get any file on the device over the network. Instead, their goal is to get you using their cloud service by artificially restricting that.
Probably true but hardly unique to Apple; Microsoft is doing the same thing and is even more obnoxious about their fucking “OneDrive”, which is the default storage option on all Office applications that it pushes at you on every opportunity. But that is the way of the future, and frankly for the majority of users, lack of direct access to the filesystem is not really a problem. You might as well complain that the university removed your Pine email client. (And believe me, I did…it ultimately made no difference.)
Stranger
Microsoft doesn’t restrict you to using that though and it is just as easy to use files from a central storage location as well.