So, for whatever reason, you can’t delete photos in the iPad’s photo-library, from the iPad itself. The only way to remove them is to connect them to the original iTunes you synced with, and do a fresh sync that doesn’t have the pictures you don’t want in it.
I called apple support, and they claimed that they could temporarily authorize a second computer, so that the second computer’s iTunes could delete the photos. I said I didn’t have time to deal with that right now, and I’d just go home at lunch and make space available, but on second thought, I wish I had let them try. I’m 99.9999% sure they would have just ended up wiping out all the content on the ipad as soon as I connected it to the ‘new’ itunes, but if there is a secret way to auto-sync an ipad with two machines at the same time, that would have been sweet to learn. And of course I would have shared that knowledge, assuming it didn’t require apple intervention to make the fix work.
Oh well.
Given how annoying this lack of basic functionality is with the iPad, I’m tempted to make another support call to see if/how that would work. All part of trying to push up the idea of a delete button from the ground up. At $280 in estimated profit per iPad, it’s going to take a lot of $2.00-cost-to-apple support calls to get them to fix the issue, sadly.
UPDATE: I should point out, I’m assuming that Steve Jobs’ obsession with DRM’ing everything is why they require iTunes to manage your photo library. Never mind that apple doesn’t sell photographs, it was easier to leave the craptastic system they build to ‘protect’ your music from you, and just apply it to images as well. Steve Jobs, you are such a jerk sometimes.
UPDATE2: AskMetafilter comes through with the solution to syncing one ipad to two iTunes’. You need to edit the iTunes Music Library.xml file on one machine or the other, so that both machines have the same value for the key “Library Persistent ID”.
