Copying Photo folders back to CartoMobile

We occasionally get requests from customers who want to edit their shapefiles on a computer and move them back to CartoMobile.   Generally, this is a very easy operation.   However, if you have a picture field and corresponding pictures, it can be a bit trickier.  

If you don't add any photos (or make any modifications) on the computer, you can leave the existing "-Pictures" folder on your device.    However, if you have added or changed pictures, things get a bit more difficult.

Unfortunately, try as we might, we haven't found a way to do this. Right now, there doesn't appear to be a way to copy a folder from a PC/Mac to an app with iTunes.

However, we did find a way (at least from a Mac) to use a little slight-of-hand and get things there. iTunes will not allow you to copy folders, but it will allow you to copy a "bundle", which is basically a folder with a special extension. Pages and Keynote, Cartographica, and many others store files in this special format.

What we found was that if we followed this sequence, we could copy the data to the iPad/iPhone. Admittedly, it's tedious, but it does work:

1. Copy a backup of the original folder on the device(if it exists) to the computer 
2. Delete the folder on the device by selecting the file name, pressing delete on the keyboard, and confirming.  This is necessary, because the device won't allow overwriting or adding to a folder 
3. On the computer, rename the folder from foo-Pictures to foo-Pictures.pages (not required to use pages, but it should be recognized... if you have Cartographica, you can use .mapset, or you can use any other kind of bundle extension). 
4. Copy the folder (now looking like a pages document) to your device using iTunes 
5. When the copy completes, select the newly-copies "file" 
6. Press return on the keyboard to allow renaming 
7. Remove the ".pages" from the name of the folder 
8. Press return again 
   ** After a few seconds, the icon should turn back into a folder.

Now CartoMobile should see the pictures. For the record, the EXIF data shouldn't be causing problems, nor should the size, although you probably want to keep the sizes down for storage capacity issues.