YOUR IPAD CAN DISPLAY photographs in most of the file formats digital cameras use, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and even those large, uncompressed RAW files that serious photographers favor. But to show your pics off on the iPad, you first have to get them onto it. You do that several ways.

Transfer Photos from Mail Messages and Web Pages

Do you have a bunch of photos someone sent you as file attachments to an email message? Or do you see a copyright-free image on the Web that you want in your image collection?

To add these pictures to your iPad’s Photos app, press your finger on the photo. Wait for a box to pop up with a Save Image or Save Images button on it (circled). Tap one to store the picture in your Photos→Camera Roll album. You can also tap the icon, and then choose the menu option there to save all your pics.

THE MODERN IPAD HAS not one but two built-in cameras. With its huge slab screen, the iPad is probably one of the more unwieldy point-and-shoot cameras out there, but photo quality has gotten better since the days of the iPad 2’s barely 1-megapixel rear camera and lower-resolution front cam. While the front cam hasn’t changed, the Retina iPad and the iPad Mini both sport a 5-megapixel camera in back. But enough of the backstory. To shoot a digital photo on the iPad:

A preview of your last shot also appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen; tap it to jump to the actual photo in the Camera Roll album. You can also swipe the screen from left to right to see it. The iPad cameras offer other controls:

To change cameras and take a self-portrait with the front camera, tap the Switch Cameras icon () in the bottom-right corner of the photo screen.

REMEMBER THOSE OLD-FASHIONED INSTANT-PORTRAIT kiosks you can still find in arcades and along boardwalks? You know, the kind where you and your pals cram together to make goofy faces for the camera and you get a strip of four black-and-white shots for a buck? Camera-equipped iPads can do the same thing, but better—the pictures are free and in color. Meet Photo Booth.

Like its desktop predecessor, Photo Booth (part of Mac OS X for years) is a simple app that lets you take your own picture if, say, you need a quick head shot for your Facebook page. You can use Photo Booth with the rear camera as well; just tap the icon. And for loads more fun, you can add one of eight special effects to your photo, including several funhouse-mirror style distortions, a thermal camera simulation, or even a creepy faux X-ray filter.

Here’s how to get going with Photo Booth:

A thumbnail version of your pic slides into the photo tray underneath the main screen. Tap the photo to see it full-size. Tap to email or copy the image. To delete a Photo Booth picture, press its thumbnail in the photo tray, tap the that appears in the thumbnail’s corner, and then tap Delete Photo.

Photo Booth saves copies of your pictures in Photos→Camera Roll, and you can share the pictures from there as well (Share and Print Photos).

NOW THAT YOU’VE GOT some pictures on your iPad, it’s time to locate them. Go to the Home screen and tap the Photos icon (the happy little sunflower).

The iPad organizes your picture collection in up to six ways—if you happen to use all the features of iPhoto ’09 and later on the Mac. After you open the iPad’s Photos app, tap the buttons at the top of the window to see the ways you can sort your images:

Working with Albums

In album form, your picture sets look like stacks of loose photographs clumped together in a sloppy pile. Tap one of the piles and the photos snap into a grid, where you can see each one as a thumbnail. If you’re looking for a specific image and you’re not quite sure which album it’s in, pinch and spread your fingers over a picture pile to get a quick animated preview of its contents without opening the album itself (right).

You can create your own photo albums on your iPad, too. In iOS 6, if you’re in the Albums view already, tap in the upper-left corner; in iOS 5, tap Edit at the top of the screen and then tap New Album on the left. Now, type a descriptive name for the album in the box that pops up. On the next screen, tap to select the pictures you want in this brand-spankin’-new album, and then tap Done.

To copy photos into an existing album from the Photos screen (or to create a new album here), tap . Select the photos you want to reorganize, then tap Add To and opt for an existing or new album (and then name the latter). You can delete pics from albums (but not from the iPad) by selecting them and tapping the icon. Share and Print Photos has instructions for deleting photos from the iPad itself.

TO SEE THE PICTURES you synced over from your computer, tap the Photos icon on the iPad’s Home screen. Then tap the Photos button at the top of the screen; the iPad arranges your pictures in a grid of thumbnails. If you chose to copy over photo albums, tap the name of an album. Mac syncers can also tap the Events, Faces, or Places buttons to see photos sorted by those categories (Find Pictures on Your iPad).

On the thumbnails screen, you can do several things:

Tap in the menu bar to email a picture (Add Picture and Video Attachments to Mail Messages), message it (Send Messages), tweet it to followers (Use Twitter), assign it to one of your iPad’s contacts (Maintain Contacts), set it as wallpaper (Change the iPad’s Wallpaper), print it (Print with Your iPad), or copy it. In iOS 6, you can post it right to Facebook from here, too. To get back to your library, tap the Photos or album-name button at the top of the screen.

IN THE DARK, BADLY cropped days before there were apps, you couldn’t do much besides view the digital pictures you snapped, downloaded, or received on your mobile gadget. It was a “look, don’t retouch” approach to photos. Thankfully, things have changed.

Need to chop out that goofy guy off to the side in your Mount Rushmore photo? Want to lighten the exposure of that party shot so you can see the birthday girl’s face? With the iPad’s built-in editor or the growing collection of photo-editing programs in the App Store, you can improve your photos right on your iPad.

And best of all, once you’re done, you can share your pics online, send them to other people by email, or, if you have a second-generation or later Apple TV, proudly beam the fruits of your labor right onto your TV using AirPlay.

To do basic image-editing in iOS 5 and later, first tap open a photo that needs fixing. Then tap the Edit button at the top of the screen. Here’s what you can do:

Hate that last change you made to a picture? Tap Undo to reverse it. Hate everything you’ve done so far? Tap “Revert to Original” to go back in time and undo all the changes you made. Once you like an edited photo, tap Save to put a copy in your Camera Roll album.

Find Third-Party Photo-Editing Apps

To do more complex photo-editing on your iPad, jump into the App Store and search for photography or photo editing. Dozens of apps pop up that can do everything the iPad’s built-in tools can, plus handle adjustments like:

• Straighten. If your picture was unintentionally shot at an angle or simply looks too crooked for your taste, tilt it a few degrees.

• Contrast. Increasing the contrast can perk up pics that seem flat and muddy.

• Exposure. When a photo looks too light or too dark, fiddling with the exposure controls might help.

• Saturation. Not all digital cameras have accurate sensors, so if the green, green grass of the ballpark looks pale or brown, increasing the color saturation can liven up a shot.

The number of photography apps in the App Store can be a bit overwhelming, but a few well-rounded options for editing and image-adjustment include Apple’s iPhoto for iPad (see next page), Ghostbird Software’s PhotoForge 2 ($2), and Snapseed ($5), which is now owned by Google.

Then there’s the Adobe empire. The company that makes Adobe Photoshop, the industry-standard program for photo-editing on the desktop, has two iPad offerings: the free Adobe Photoshop Express and the powerful $10 Adobe Photoshop Touch (below). While you can make basic edits with the former, the latter is a powerful app for photographers who want to burrow into Photoshop’s toolbox to work with layers, curves, gradients, and other elements in detail.

SINCE THE IPAD’S ARRIVAL, Apple has been converting the Mac desktop programs in its iLife suite into slick, affordable $5 iPad apps. iTunes, GarageBand, and iMovie all got the tablet treatment, and now, so has iPhoto.

So you may be asking, “Why should I pay $5 for this extra iPhoto thing when the iPad comes with a perfectly good free Photos app that lets me get rid of red-eye and crop out the bad parts of a picture?” If red-eye reduction and cropping are all you ever need to do to your pictures, you probably don’t need iPhoto. But if you want to do all the image-editing tasks (like exposure and contrast fixes) mentioned on the previous page—and you want a powerful app designed specifically for the iPad by its creator—well, iPhoto is pretty darn good.

When you tap open the app for the first time, it finds all your picture collections from the Photos app and displays them in the same album groupings on the Albums screen. The familiar tabs at the top of the screen also include Photos and Events, along with a tab called Journals, which lets you make a little digital scrapbook of photos you select—a good way to share memories.

But it’s iPhoto’s retouching powers that really make it impressive. Tap the Brushes icon in the toolbar (circled below) to get tools for removing blemishes and red-eye from your subjects. You can also choose to saturate your image—make that sky more blue or the grass more green. And if a picture seems a bit gaudy or garish, you can also desaturate (tone down) the colors.

Use other brushes in the set to lighten, darken, sharpen, or soften parts of an image—all with gentle swipes of your finger. And you can adjust the exposure of the whole image with a screen slider or drag your finger around a photo to find the perfect balance of color.

The iPhoto for iPad app includes several filters for turning color photographs into retro-looking black & white shots, as well as options for adding tints and effects that make the pictures seem like they were taken by cameras from an earlier era. You can spend hours tapping new looks onto your photos, and if you have any regrets about a move, you can always tap the Undo button—or ditch all the changes you made to a picture and revert to the original image.

Sharing Pictures with iPhoto

Once you get your picture all picture-perfect, you’ll probably want to share it. When the time comes, tap in the iPhoto toolbar to open a box full of friendly options. As shown below, you can save photos to a Journal scrapbook (previous page); copy pics to the Camera Roll in your Photos app; sync ’em over to your computer via iTunes; and email, print, or release them into the social network wilds of Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. There’s a cooler way to share, too.

If you have more iOS devices running iPhoto (including iPhones, iPod Touches, and other iPads) in the area, you can beam pictures right to them over your wireless network connection. Who needs email when you can teleport?

To live the beam dream on your iPad, go to the top iPhoto toolbar and tap →Wireless Beaming→On. In that same settings area, make sure you have Photo Location turned on as well. You need to have Location Services (Sounds) turned on in the main Settings area of the target iOS devices, too. Then tap the Beam button and transport those photos right over to the other gadget.

The iPhoto app may not be for everyone, but you do get a lot of artistic bang for your five bucks. If you have any questions about how the app works, tap the icon up in the toolbar to see instructions and tips appear instantly on-screen.

A SLIDESHOW TAKES ALL the photo tap-and-drag work out of your hands, freeing you up to sit back and admire your pictures without distraction. To run a slideshow on your iPad, you need to set a few options, like how long each photo appears on-screen and what music accompanies your photo parade.

The iPad keeps its slideshow settings in two places. All of the timing and order-of-pic options are in the iPad’s Settings area. To get there, tap Settings→Photos & Camera (Settings→Photos in iOS 5). Then, you can choose:

Now that you have these matters worked out, go back to the Photos app and tap open the album you want to present as a slideshow. On the upper-right side of the menu bar, tap the Slideshow button to open the Slideshow Options box (above). Here, you can choose:

Once you make all your selections, you’re ready for showtime. Tap the Start Slideshow button. To stop the show, tap the iPad screen.

Many accessories makers sell iPad cases that can form an impromptu stand or easel so you can prop the tablet up on a table top. If you have one of these, you don’t need to hold the iPad up to look at your photos with friends. You, like everyone else, can just lean back and watch the show as it unfolds across the screen.

YOU CAN GET YOUR photos flipping across a TV screen a couple of ways. For one, you can wirelessly stream them to a connected second- or third-generation Apple TV using AirPlay (see Stream and Mirror Files with AirPlay for a description of AirPlay). Or, you can connect your tablet to the TV with a cable (flip back to Manage Your Expectations With Up Next for help doing that).

To beam your show to your little black Apple TV over the airwaves of your own home network via AirPlay—and then onto your connected HDTV—follow these steps:

If you don’t have an Apple TV, but do have an Apple AV cable:

THE IPAD COMES PRE-STOCKED with several gorgeous high-resolution photos—mostly nature scenes and textured patterns intended as background images for both the Lock and Home screens. (In case you’re wondering what the difference is, the Lock screen is the one you see when you first turn on the iPad, and the Home screen has all your app icons scattered about.)

If you want to change these background images to spice things up, you can assign new photos two ways.

The first is to go to the Home screen and tap Settings→Brightness & Wallpaper. Tap the Wallpaper panel (circled). On the next screen, choose a photo from any of your photo albums, or tap Wallpaper to pick an Apple stock shot. Tap the photo you want to use. You can drag the image around and finger-pinch and spread it to shrink or enlarge the parts of the picture you want to display.

When you’re done, tap the appropriate button at the top of the screen. You have your choice of Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, or Set Both. You can also bail out with a Cancel button in the left corner.

The second way to wallpaper your ’Pad is to pick a picture out of one of the iPad’s photo albums and tap at the top of the screen, and then tap the “Use as Wallpaper” option. Here, you can size and save the photo as described above. No matter which way you choose to change it, there’s nothing like fresh new wallpaper to personalize your iPad—and show off your own photography.

AS MENTIONED AT THE beginning of this chapter, the iPad resembles a digital picture frame. And if you want one of those, you can turn the iPad’s Lock screen into an ever-changing window that displays your photo collection, a pleasant diversion as the iPad recharges from a wall outlet.

To test out your framed photo parade, press the Sleep/Wake button to turn off the iPad screen and press it again to get back to the Lock screen. Tap the small flower icon next to the lock slider to start the slideshow. To pause the pictures, tap the iPad’s screen. You can either tap the flower icon again to resume the show or swipe the slider to unlock the iPad and get back to work.