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How to Quickly Move Photos & Movies From Your Camera to the iPad Pro

The Apple iPad Pro is Apple's first serious attempt to have consumers use their iPads for productivity purposes that they would normally have used their Mac's for.  One of the main reasons why people use their Mac's is to download photos from their cameras, edit, and organize them.  Mac's typically come with SD card slots but iPad's do not.  To address this, Apple came out with the Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader which is the first time Apple has enabled USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gb/s) connectivity with their iPads just like what you'd find on the Mac's.

The Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader works great for only one purpose- download photos and videos taken from camera.  That means that the SD card needs to have a DCIM folder containing all the photos.  

Power users looking for more flexibility will be disappointed.  You can't move media from the iPad Pro to the SD card and can only transfer images/movies in the DCIM folder from the SD card into the iPad Pro.   

Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader works well SD cards that you use for action cameras like the GoPro HERO4 Session like the Lexar 633x although you will need an adapter to go from micro SD to SD.  Once you insert the Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader with the Lexar 633x into the Apple iPad Pro, the Photos app will automatically open to the import screen.

You can choose to select some photos to import or simply select 'Import All'.  

It took about 5 minutes to download roughly 80 minutes worth of GoPro camera videos.

After the download is complete, can you choose to keep or delete the photos from the SD card.

If you use Digital SLR cameras like the Canon EOS Rebel T5i, SD cards like the SanDisk Ultra 40 MB/s UHS-I cards also work well with the Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader.  Photos collections will naturally transfer much faster than videos.

The Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader only supports UHS-I based SD cards and large videos files tend to transfer slowly despite USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gb/s) connectivity.  Since most cameras out there still don't support faster UHS-II cards, it makes sense Apple only supports the same UHS-I cards that most cameras use.  Hopefully in the future more cameras will support UHS-II allowing you to transfer your content around much quicker and take advantage of higher USB speeds.