How to add videos, songs, and photos to an iPod

Posted on February 16, 2008 at 6:14 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Apple iPhone & iPod Tips series!

  1. How to add more sources to iPhone and iPod Touch installer apps
  2. How to add videos, songs, and photos to an iPod
  3. How to setup email on the iPhone - Access Gmail on iPhone
  4. Get the iPhone interface on your BlackBerry using bPhone
  5. Five cool games you can play on your Apple iPhone

Here’s a relatively simple and straightforward guide to adding videos, songs, and photos to your iPod. Several clients have asked me how to do this and I thought it reasonable to create a short guide for referring clients to! So if you’re new to technology and the iPod or iPod Touch, I’ll try to walk you through some simple steps to get movies, songs, and digital pictures onto your iPod.

How to add videos to iPod

So basically if you want to get a video onto your iPod, you first need to have a video downloaded onto your computer! This can be a video transferred to your hard drive from a digital camera or digital camcorder, a video downloaded off Internet video sharing sites like YouTube, etc, or a video that is stored on a DVD disc.

It may not sound easy, but it’s actually very simple to download videos off the Internet and to convert DVDs into a format compatible with your iPod. Thankfully there are great people out there who write free software to do all of this for us!

videora

Videora iPod Converter is a free iPod video converter that converts video files, YouTube videos, movies and DVD’s so you can play them on your iPod. The software can convert all types of video files including avi, divx, xvid, flv, x264, vob, mpeg, DVD’s, YouTube, etc into the proper video formats (MPEG-4, H.264) that play on the iPod.

With Videora iPod Converter you can convert videos for any type of iPod that plays video including the new iPod touch, iPod nano and iPod classic in addition to the 5th generation iPod. You can also convert videos for the iPhone.

This is a really great piece of software and makes life really easy! However, you might say well this only converts, so how do I download videos off the Internet? Well Videora also has another application that can search and download videos for you from many of the most popular video sharing sites. Use them both together and you don’t have to do anything!

You can read the help guide here on how to setup the Videora iPod conversion program in case you’re not sure. Once Videora has finished converting the file, it will automatically show up in iTunes. Just sync your iPod with iTunes and your movies will be downloaded! You can also manually drag the movies onto the iPod in the left hand menu to copy them over.

itunes

That’s it! You should now be able to convert and watch any video that you have on your iPod! Enjoy!

How to add songs to iPod

There are actually a couple of ways to add songs to your iPod because it depends on the source of the files. For example, you may purchase songs from iTunes, or you might want songs from a CD, or you might want to import songs downloaded from a peer to peer sharing program like Limewire, etc.

Of course, if you purchase a song from iTunes, your song will show up in your music library automatically and you simply need to sync your iPod with iTunes.

If you want to rip a CD and put it onto your iPod, you first open iTunes and then insert your CD. iTunes will automatically read the tracks and get the album info from CDDB. Choose your tracks and click the Import button at the top right. Your tracks will be ripped into the Libaray folder.

You can also click on the Browse button at the top right when viewing the Library and it will list the songs by genre, artist, and album.

import music itunes

If you already have some MP3’s lying around on your hard disk in a specific folder, you can go to the File menu and choose Add to Library.

You can also drag and drop songs into iTunes by dropping them onto the Library icon above the playlists. If you have a bunch of songs in Winamp or Limewire and don’t know where the songs are stored, you can create a playlist and save it with a .m3u file extension. Import that playlist into iTunes and then go to Advanced and then Consolidate Library. iTunes will copy the actual files to the iTunes library automatically.

consolidate library

How to add photos to iPod

So you have a crap load of pictures on your computer, but you don’t know how to get them onto your iPod right!? Well first off connect up your iPod and start up iTunes. Once your iPod shows up on the left hand side, click on it.

At the lower right, you’ll see a few buttons and you want to click on the leftmost button, which is the iPod Options button.

ipod button

Now in the Options dialog box, click on the Photos tab. You’ll see a check box called “Synchronize Photos From“. Check that box and then choose the location where you want iTunes to search for your photos. By default, it looks in My Pictures, but if you don’t store them there, you can browse to a different location.

Once it finds all of the albums, you can choose to synchronize all albums, or just specific ones.

add photos to ipod

Click OK and iTunes will start to add your photos to your iPod! And don’t worry about the resolution of the photos as iTunes will automatically adjust the images so that they look nice on the iPod.

So that’s how you add photos, videos, and songs to your iPod! Any questions or comments, please post! Enjoy!

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5 Responses to “How to add videos, songs, and photos to an iPod”

  1. ana said on : June 16th, 2008 at 11:39 am

    Ola… tenho um ipod classic 80gb, ja adicionei as fotos para o ipod mas agora quero colocar mais e quando clico em sincronizar fotos ele diz que vai substituir todas as fotos pelas novas que vou introduzir e eu nao quero so quero adicionar mais… como faço…


  2. Phil Lefock said on : July 17th, 2008 at 3:34 am

    In case you want to bypass iTunes, you might want to use one of thoses alternatives:
    http://manageipodphotos.wordpr.....ternatives


  3. Pauline said on : November 13th, 2008 at 6:52 am

    will my songs be erased from my ipod if i choose to sync my photos? how can i manually sync the photos in my ipod without affecting the other files such as songs and movies?


  4. funky freak said on : November 26th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    u rock


  5. sunpastilles said on : April 6th, 2009 at 12:51 am

    How do i put pictures of the album’s cover in?

    I’m not talking about my own pictures that i take outside with my camera,
    I’m talking about the Record Album Pictures that show whenever a song is playing.

    For example, when i play Bon Jovi’s Have A Nice Day on my Nano,
    the screen shows its Album Cover.

    Some other songs do not have it, so how do i put the pictures in?

    Thank you in advanced, your help is greatly appreciated.


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