How to move photos from an old eMac to an iPad?

I need to move photos from an old eMac to a new iPad Air. The eMac won't be used anymore after everything is transferred. I already tried the following approaches, but they didn’t quite have the expected result:

• Sync photos from iPhoto to iPad using iTunes (because the eMac is too old to run the required version of iTunes for the iPad, I used another Mac as an intermediate on which I set up iPhoto). This creates an album like “Pictures from Mac” that can't be removed, any of these photos must be duplicated before they can be edited.
  
  This is not really what's wanted: the idea is to “move” the photos permanently to the iPad, not “make them available on the iPad for viewing”, which is what iTunes sync really seems to do.


• Used the app GoodReader to get the files from the eMac via AFP, then added them from GoodReader to the Photos app. This seems to better do what's wanted.
  
  But all the photos appeared as if they were taken today, rather than on their original date (even though the export from iPhoto to the folder which I accessed through AFP preserved the timestamp of the photos in the “modification timestamp” of the files)

How can I “move” (not “sync”) the photos to the iPad, while preserving the timestamp of the photos?