IPhoto shows zero photos on ipad

Question

Howdy,
I'm using a new MacBook Pro running OS X (10.10) and trying to download photographs from an even new iPad running iOS 7.1.1.  Most online instructions say that you can connect the devices with a USB cable and run either iPhoto or ImageCapture. I've connected the devices, but can't download the photos.
When I run iPhoto 9.6 the icon for the iPad appears as expected under "Devices" in the left-hand tray. There are no photo thumbnails in the main window. Both the "Import Selected" and the "Import (0) Photos" buttons in the upper-right are grayed-out. There is a bit of text underneath the "Import (0) Photos" button that says "Loading", but that text is also grayed-out.
Similarly, when running ImageCapture 6.6 the icon for the iPad appears as expected under "Devices" in the left-hand tray. Underneath that is another heading saying "SHARED" followed with a gray oval that has "0" (zero, I believe) in the middle. There are no thumbnails in the main window.
Clearly, neither iPhoto nor ImageCapture on my Mac can "see" the photos that I can see on my iPad. Does the iPad have some locking mechanism that prevents external computers from retrieving images? How do I make the photos on the iPad visible to the Mac?
Thanks,
Marty

Answer 1

This is what I've found, via the "Chat" feature in Apple's online support:
My objective was to move an iPhoto library from an old MacBook to a new MacBook Pro. As a first step, I had uploaded the library to my iPad using the "sync" mechanism. The sync  mechanism worked, in the sense that I can now see the roughly 3500 photos on my iPad. According to Apple's support group (I used their "Online Chat" option) the problem is that once photos have been synced they can not be subsequently downloaded to another device. The tech at Apple recommended that I hook up an external drive to the old MacBook, copy the iPhoto library to the external drive, then attach the external drive to the new MacBook Pro and use iPhoto's "File ==> Import To Library" to effect the transfer on the new computer.
This worked, "sort of". The down side is that my library exploded from about 3500 images to 21,000. (It took 21 GB on the external drive). After using the recommended "File ==> Import to Library" I found that almost every event was replicated and some had three or even four replications (some of which were partial). I spent a long time deleting the duplicate events and then found that double clicking on certain images would only open a tiny representation. Using the "get info" it became apparent that these tiny images are just ~50 kb copies of the ~3 Mb original images. These tiny copies are not useful to me, although my guess is that these are the files used in the iPhoto interface.
This is not the sort of thing that makes a user happy - several days lost on a seemingly commonplace task like copying a photo library from an old computer to a new computer under the direction of the manufacturer's own support team.
Looking again at the web documentation, I gather that it was a mistake to use the "Import to Library" feature. Instead, I should have just dragged the iPhoto Library icon onto my new computer's disk drive and opened it as a normal library with iPhoto.