IPad – get the pictures from the iPad to the PC

Well, two trips to the genius bar couldn't solve it ("you need to start a new library from scratch and retag your 15,000 photos" - WHAT?!?!), but I dug around and experimented and finally came up with the answer:

iTunes won't sync pictures without up-to-date previews; so, if they stop auto-generating for some reason, you have to force it to update previews for the pictures that aren't syncing.

1. You may want to go to iTunes and select "Sync all Photos" and note the number of photos that appears in the upper right of the window, so you can make sure that it's higher after this process.
2. Go to Aperture and select "Photos" up near the top of your library, in order to select your whole library of pics.
3. In the "Photos" menu up top, you should see "update previews for library". (If you're not seeing it, you probably skipped step 2, or selected an individual photo, in which case, it will be replaced with "update preview". You want to do it for everything, so be sure to highlight "photos" first.
4. That may take some time, depending how many you were missing, but once it's done, go back to iPhoto, and uncheck "sync all photos" and then recheck it. That should force it to recount the pics, and you should now see a number that matches your library (less any in a format that iTunes can't handle.)

If all your edited photos are new versions of the original, then I'm guessing you've got Aperture set to create new versions when you make adjustments (that's an option in Preferences). In that case, then each photo is probably in a stack with all of its versions. Generally, only the "pick" (or top) of each stack is synced with your iOS device. So you need to go through your album and move all the edited versions to the top of their stacks.

To do this:

• Open your album in Aperture
• In the Stacks menu, choose Open All Stacks
• For each of the stacks in the album, choose the version you want and choose "Pick" under the Stacks menu. This will make the chosen version jump to the far left of the group.
  • I might be wrong on the name of that command, but I believe the shortcut for it is Command-\. That's what I usually use, instead of the menu option.

You can then re-sync your device, and the proper versions should show up. You might want to try it with one or two of them to make sure it works before doing it for all of them.

Additionally, you might want to turn off the option to create new versions for each adjustment. It'll mitigate this problem in the future. Aperture uses non-destructive editing anyway, so you're not making irreversible changes to the original no matter what. If you want to make multiple versions of a photo, you can do it manually with the Duplicate Version command (in the right-click menu on a photo, or somewhere in the menu options at the top).