As you learned in our previous iPad tutorial, you can backup and copy pictures from your iPad Photos library to your computer; this process is explained in details, and is rigorously the same. At the end of the process, instead of copying the photos from the iPad to your computer, you will simply have to cut them and paste them in a destination folder of your choice on your computer. In this tutorial, we'll focus more on the different choices you have between a simple backup or copy, and an actual transfer that will remove these pictures from your iPad, and store them on your computer instead.
Should you copy photos or transfer photos from your iPad?
When you plug in your iPad to your desktop computer or laptop, one of several behaviors will occur, which depends partly on which operating system you are using: remember that, although you can only manage your iPad from iTunes, which is only available for Windows 7 / Vista / XP and Mac OS X, you can access your iPad photos as an external storage device from pretty much any OS, including Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, or other distribution), so long as you have the iPad's USB cable and a USB port on your machine.
When you navigate to the "Internal Storage > DCIM > 100APPLE" path where your iPad stores all pictures of its Photos library, you can then select all (Ctrl+A or Command+A), or Control-click or Command-click to select only some of these PNG picture files.
As soon as you cut them, and paste them to another folder on your computer, these files will no longer be visible or available on your iPad. (You can also of course use another move command -like "Move To" in Windows Explorer, to transfer these photos to your computer without going through the clipboard by cutting them.) If your computer crashes, and you no longer have a copy of these files on your iPad, they will be lost for good. So, in general, and if you have enough disk storage left on your iPad, creating a simple copy (backup) might be more advisable - that way, you have your iPad Photos on both your iPad and one of your computers!