So sorry to hear about your wife passing. I've been there. It's never easy.
Wiping the iPad Mini is extremely easy, Zeugma. It takes just a couple of minutes to return it to factory blank condition and it is completely clear, unlike the vast majority of Android tablets and phones which cannot be completely erased. Go into Settings, General, and scroll to the bottom to find "Reset" where you will select "Erase All Content and Settings." You will need to be able to put in the Apple ID associated with the iPad Mini to OK action. It will then take a few minutes to wipe everything and then reboots to a new iPad condition with nothing recoverable by the new owner/user.
As for sharing pictures and stuff with folks, Apple makes it easy to send even the largest photos or even videos via email regardless of the email capacity of the recipient's email boxes. Apple has a temporary cache system that holds the file and then puts a download link automatically into the email you send for the recipient to click which then automatically downloads the file, regardless of the size. It never hits their mailbox to choke it nor does it slow the downloading of their email.
So sorry to hear about your wife passing. I've been there. It's never easy.
Yup. Fortunately for us, we saw it coming. She battled cancers for over 5 years before it became too much to bear. The Lord takes care of us on the bad days, even more than the good. He has blessed us far more than we can ever comprehend.
Wiping the iPad Mini is extremely easy, Zeugma. It takes just a couple of minutes to return it to factory blank condition and it is completely clear, unlike the vast majority of Android tablets and phones which cannot be completely erased.
Oh, I'm fully aware of that. The reason I'm delaying doing a wipe of the device is because she was the person who managed the bills in our household. There is information on it that I'll be needing for a while. I'll probably not be wiping it until after tax season is over just in case I need something from it. My Mother-in-Law has taken over her MacBook, and we left WifeofZeugma's user on it, (which we had a fun time resetting the password for), for exactly the same reason.
I'm well aware of the difficulties of completely wiping android devices that weren't as well engineered as the iPad. When I finally dump the one I'm using I'll probably do so with a sledge hammer and a blowtorch. :-)
As for the file sharing stuff, it's not really that simple. I tend to share stuff in the family with DVD's and fobs because it tends to not really be a matter of a couple of files. Fobs are actually just about cheap enough for the amount of data that you can put on them these days, but they still can't beat a DVD for cheap media, that is fairly hardy for what it is.
It's a preference thing more than anything else. I'm turning more into an old curmudgeon as time passes. Don't like the 'cloud' so much.
Heck, I've started to get really annoyed with Linux distros over the past few years, as they've let systemd creep into, and take over subsystems in a way that I really don't particularly care for.