This took me awhile to figure out, so thought I’d detail it here for the one or two of you who might scroll far enough down the search results to find it…

I’m have mostly Apple/Mac devices, but wanted a cheap compact monitor to display reference photos when drawing/painting, so got a little 10″ Android tablet. One way to get photos from my Mac to the tablet is via Google Photos, which I’ve been doing for a year or so. But it takes some tending/sorting/deleting/syncing, and pesters me every other day trying to get me to backup everything onto it so they can get me over the free limit and charge me…so I found an old flash drive (aka thumb drive or USB drive) to try. My cheap tablet only has one port: a USB-C port. Finding it odd that it didn’t have any other ports (not even for SD cards, which the description *said* it had, but it didn’t), I wondered if the C port might work with flash drives. First hurdle: my old flash drives are all USB-A, so I got an adapter and plugged the drive into my tablet. Nothing happened. I expected to see its icon pop up on the home pages somewhere, but nope, not that simple…so here is step by step how to make it work:

Get USB-A to USB-C adapter if needed (mine were 2 for $7…or get flash drives made for USB-C):

and plug it into your tablet:

Go to Settings > Storage on your tablet, tap the pull-down to find your flash drive…on mine, if I just tap to select it, nothing happens—I have to hold it selected for a few seconds, then it chooses the flash drive. (Note the “This device” pull down was not there at all until I plugged in the flash drive.) You may get a notice that the drive is incompatible…

If so, go to three dots at upper right,

which should bring up options to rename, eject, or format:

Choose Format (WARNING, THIS WILL *ERASE* EVERYTHING ON THE FLASH DRIVE) and format with exFAT, for Mac to Android compatibility (exFAT also works for PC to Android).

Now that it’s formatted to be compatible with multiple platforms, load up your flash drive with images or whatever, and plug it into the USB-C port.

Now open your tablet’s Files app and scroll down to All Storage. Select the USB option (name may be different than what you named it), which will give you access to all folders/files on the flash drive:

When finished using it, don’t just unplug it…you need to *Eject* it properly. So go back to Settings > Storage > and open the pull down menu as described above to choose the USB drive, go to the three dots at upper right and choose Eject, now you can safely remove the flash drive and/or adapter cable.

Now I can just drag a folder of photos onto my flash drive to browse on my tablet, with no concerns about Google Photos. For editing on the Android tablet, I recommend ArtFlow…has a nicer feel to it than Google Photos editor in my opinion…and it can do layers.

Don’t forget that your device will NOT be charging as long as you have the USB/flash drive occupying the one and only USB-C port!

(Details may vary on your device, but hopefully this will give you some breadcrumbs to follow to get it working.)