Finding Your Files

Though there's no Windows Explorer or Mac Finder on iPad where you can view all your stored files in one place, iPad does store files. Open up the Photos app, for example, and you see lots of photos, each one contained in a file. The iPod app contains audio files, Videos contains movie files, iBooks contains e-Book files, if you own Pages it contains word processing documents and so on.

Though there's no Windows Explorer feature on iPad, when you connect iPad to a PC you can use the Windows Explorer feature on your computer to move files around on iPad.

How did those files get there? You may have created them in iPad (as with the Notes or Numbers apps); you may have downloaded them from the Internet, as with music or video purchases from iTunes; or you may have synced them from your computer, as with music files or photos.

Depending on the app you open, you may see a My Documents button to display thumbnails of documents, libraries of photos as in Photos, albums of music or individual song files as in iPod or bookshelves or lists of e-books as in iBooks. Each app offers a slightly different way to find whatever you've created on, downloaded to, or synced to your iPad.

If you go to iTunes on your computer with your iPad connected, you can see your iPad file structure organized by app. But however the files got in there and however you find them when you open an app, getting them out of your iPad is the focus of this tutorial.