There are many ways to capture an image, but only a few ways to get your photos from your camera to your computer. This WW session will go over those methods and make sure that you can understand which way is best for you. At the end of this session we’ll show the pros and cons of each method, but for now, we’ll introduce a few of the common image acquisition methods
Since the primary goal of taking photos is to do something with them, you need to have them on a computer or at the very least on a CD or DVD.
The basic methods of acquiring images are in the diagram below, and we will discuss each of them in the following paragraphs.
Acquiring Images Without A (Your) Computer
We aren’t going to spend a lot of time on this method, since it probably isn’t the most fun way to get your digital images, but it is possible to get your images from your camera to your computer without ever plugging the camera or memory card into at least YOUR computer. We’re not talking about giving your camera or memory card to a friend and saying “here, can you get these images off of this, please”. We’re talking about going to a local photo center, like your local drug store (Walgreens) or general store (Target, Walmart) or local camera store (Wolf, Ritz). Most of these full service photo centers have a digital kiosk, and at that kiosk you can insert your camera’s memory card into it. The kiosk machine will read your card and ask you what you want to do with the images. At some point, you can ask (or tell) the machine to save all of your images to CD or DVD. If you choose that option, you will probably wait a few minutes, and perhaps up to an hour or two depending on how whether they burn your CD/DVD on the spot or whether it is queued up with all the other image orders they have. Regardless, within a short period of time and WITHOUT a computer, you have just acquired all of your images to a semi-permanent medium. What you do with your images at that point is up to you.
Acquiring Images Through The Camera
One of the most popular methods for acquiring images is through the camera directly connected to the computer. The most common way this is achieved is through the USB cable that likely came with your camera, and this is probably the method you first used to get your first digital images from your camera. This method is easy and hassle-free and you can use the same cable on more than one computer if you need to, for example get images onto your laptop when you’re on vacation or out of town. The transmission speeds from the camera to the computer are generally quite fast, but this will vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer, and of course, the memory card speed and size will play a large role. Using this method, your camera will look like another device or drive to your computer, which will allow you to interact with the images on the camera as if there were on a local hard drive, CD or DVD. On Windows XP and Vista you will be able to browse your images directly from the camera while its still connected to the computer. To do this on Windows, you just open a file explorer, find your camera in the device tree that you see all of your other devices (hard drives, CDs and DVDs), click on your camera and you’ll then be able to navigate to your images and interact with them like any other file on your computer.
As an aside, this method is increasingly being replaced or substituted by wireless connections. Some cameras, for instance the Nikon P3, will connect to your computer over a wireless Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. No cables are required, leaving you worry- and cable-free yet wireless transmission speeds may still lag slightly begin wired transfers.
Acquiring Images Through The Memory Card
Another popular method of acquiring images is through an external or internal memory card reader. With this method, you will just remove the memory card from the camera, insert the card into the reader, and again, the card will appear on your computer as if it were a hard drive, CD or DVD. If you have a laptop or more recent Desktop computer, there is a good change it will have slots that accept a varied of memory cards, the most popular of which are SD, XD, MMC and Memory Stick (Sony). You might find this method to be as convenient as the connecting the camera directly, and in some cases it may be faster than the direct connection. If you have more than one memory card to obtain images from, you can leave one card in your camera and put the other card in your reader and acquire the images simultaneously, dramatically reducing the transfer time for two or more cards.
If you buy an external reader, it will most likely be connected via the USB port on your computer. There are some external readers that are based on the Firewire standard, which is commonly used for hi-speed digital video transfers and is similar to USB but faster. Such Firewire readers, however, are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
What’s Happening To My Images When I Connect My Computer
For a lot of us, when we purchased our first digital camera, we followed all the instructions by installing the manufacturer’s programs and drivers for connecting our cameras. In general, this isn’t a bad thing to do, but sometimes the software uses defaults that do unexpected things. One such thing is downloading images from the camera onto your computer without you necessarily agreeing to this. What then happens, is that every time you connect your computer, that program is registered as the default program to download your images to. This, of course, can have all sorts of unwanted side effects. First, the program that may be grabbing your images, may be a program you have never seen or used before, nor intend to use in the future. Sometimes, these applications are “bundled” with the manufacturer’s driver’s and you may not even know the name of the application, let alone what it was intended to do. Second, if you don’t know where your images are being downloaded to, then you may be in for a wild goose chase to try and find those vacation images you are dying to review on the big screen.
If you are one of the many camera users that have a “rogue” program taking over your images, there are some fairly easy ways to disable such programs – and perhaps uninstall them altogether. See this screencast on how to deal with just this issue.
My Camera Is Connected, Now What?
There are a lot of things that culminate to the final task at hand : acquiring your images from your camera. We’ll be discussing in detail the techniques which will be used to catalog your images – including renaming them, tagging them and adding any addition metadata that you may find useful and relevant.
For now, however, we care about one task and one task only : copying your images from your camera to your computer. One the the fastest ways to do this is (after having plugged your camera or memory card into your computer), to manually copy your images from the camera to a designated location on in your personal folders or desktop. This can usually be done by simply dragging and dropping the images from your camera to the folder you want to contain your images.
This is enough to get us started. In the next session, we’ll begin to discuss acquiring images automatically into Photoshop Elements 6.0 as well as some additional workflow steps you can follow to rename, backup and your images and begin the initial cataloging workflow.
