Importing from iPad result in timeout

Question

I am returning from my first vacation with my iPad, my camera connection kit and my Nikon D90.
After each day, I imported (can we say uploaded?) my pics onto the iPad. This was fun to view with my familly.
Now back at home, I can not cleanly import my 1,200 or so pics from vacation.
Aperture starts importing, but then stalls, timesout into some endless loop.
Aperture still responds and I can do all that I want to do except that the Importing activity "wheel" (monitor) spins and spins but Aperture does not import my pics beyond the 75th or so picture.
I force AP to quit, rebuild my DB and tried again.
Same result.
Using iPad OS 3.2.1 with AP3 3.0.3 with Snow Leopard 10.6.4.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

OK. Here's what I have learned about alternatives. There is an iPad app that looks somewhat promising for getting photos on/off the device, but rather than muck about with a paid app on speculation that it will do what I need, I found a different scheme.
My having asked the question about a possible Linux solution prompted me to fire up my Ubuntu (current version) virtual machine and attach my iPad to it. There, I had the ability to mount my Home Directory on the iPad onto my Linux VM.
From there, I was able to find the directories under my ~/DCIM directory that hold the *.NEF, *.JPG, *.MOV, etc. files. Each of these appears to contain a single session of importing into Photos on the iPad. As I had done the import at the end of each day, I have a directory containing the files for each day. (Actually, there appears to be some other force at work here, as my last day was split over two directories. Maybe that day had more images than iPad wants to put into a single directory.)
I went into each such directory in turn, and using "tar -czvf", created a compressed tar file (containing file datestamp information) onto a directory on my Mac which was also mounted on the Linux VM. Once the tgz files were on the Mac, it was a simple matter to use "tar -xvf" to extract each into its own directory, clean out the *.XMP files (which appear to be indications that the matching image should be rotated to a different orientation, and which are probably meaningless to Aperture when importing files as I am forced to do using this method), and import the files into Aperture.
All of the rigamarole took far less time to handle 4 days worth of photos than the normal way took to do a single day. Plus, while Aperture grinds through a days worth of photos, I can go do something else; I don't have to baby-sit it a few images at a time.
I'll continue to follow this discussion, if any. Also, I hope that things get fixed sometime soon. In the mean time, I have my baroque workaround. I will not mark the question as "solved", though, as it is not reasonable to assume that everyone trying to use the iPad as an intermediary between camera and Aperture will have a Linux system.
Another thing of note -- I mentioned that the tar operation retained the datestamp information. While this doesn't seem to be of any importance for JPG or NEF files, as Aperture uses the internal date information, it is crucial for the MOV files. I assume that MOV files have no internal date information, at least none that Aperture knows how to access or none that my Nikon applies. In the absence of such internal date information, Aperture uses the creation date on the file itself. There appears to be no way to override the date on those MOV files once they have been imported. Furthermore, the timezone settings on import appear to be insufficient to get the MOV files in the proper date order; they still come in with whatever creation date they have and assume the current timezone. So, I had to do some scripting to add six hours to the datestamp information on each MOV file before starting Aperture to do the import. Because Aperture appears to use the Creation date, SetFile had to be used instead of "touch".
Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am happy, and would definitely not recommend anyone buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit unless they never planned to get the photos back out or were uber-geeks.
Thanks to anyone who stayed with me through all this. I hope someone passes the information along to the iPad and/or Aperture team(s) and lights a fire under them.
Ron.