Transferring
(Downloading) and Saving
"They are in the camera,
now what do I do with them?"
Transferring
Once you have shot some images, you need to transfer
them to your computer or a storage device for archiving, fixing and
printing.
There are many ways to transfer
images:
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Direct
Connection (good)
Use the supplied USB or Firewire cable to directly connect
to you computers port. This uses the cameras batteries,
and can be quite slow depending on the connection.
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Card Reader (better)
Take the memory card out of the camera and place it into
a card reader. This saves the camera's batteries and
is more flexible as you can buy card readers that read
a variety of media. Some computers come equiped with
card readers built in.
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Wireless (best)
A much more expensive solution requiring a camera with wireless
capabilities or a special device, but allows for spontaneous
downloads without wires.
There are even cards that have this capability.
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Direct Connect
If you decide to directly connect to your computer, then your computer needs
to know what kind of device is trying to connect to it. If you installed any
software when you got your camera, then a device driver was installed that allows
your computer to recognize and interact with the camera. Even if you didn't,
many popular cameras are part of the operating system's driver updates.
Once the computer recognizes the camera, one of two things will happen,
1) it will launch the software that you installed, which most likely has a way
to import the images from the camera to the computer, or,
2) it will launch the windows import wizard which asks you what
it should do with the pictures that it detects.
You can run through that if you want, but
even better and easier is to treat the connection like a disk drive
or a CD that you put in. The Macintosh already does this, it's
called mounting a disk.
This is what it looks like when you double click on "my computer".
Your disk will usually be named based on the camera maker or system.
The image below shows a Canon (formatted) disk.
Basically, the computer just sees it like any
other device plugged into it, so it assigns it a drive letter, which
means you can drag stuff out of it or into it just like a floppy disk,
hard disk, CD, or DVD.
Plug in your camera or your card reader with
a card and go to:
My Computer. Inside the disk there will usually be a couple of folders.
The DCIM (digital camera images) folder contains your images.
You can copy or move images,
or even delete them, though it is generally better to delete images
from your card by going to the camera settings and choosing Format.
Selecting
"Format" from your menu will usually bring up a window warning you
that you are about to delete all of your images, and a confirmation
button. By erasing your images this way, you actually start
your card off fresh, eliminating any errors that might corrupt your
memory card.
Once you press OK, your images will be erased
and you can re-use the memory card again. This is permanent, so I suggest
looking in the folder you just copied them to, to make sure they are
there before you delete your images in your camera; you can not undo
this.
Saving
Now that you are taking digital photographs, you will need to
start a system so that you can store them safely and easily find them
again later. Think of creating a folder structure that contains just
your digital photos at the top. This should be easy to find and access
from the desktop or you will ignore it and dump image all over your machine.
Inside your main folder, create general folder topics like, kids, dogs,
portraits, sports. Inside those you can create more and more detailed
folders depending on how you shoot and how often. The idea is to name
them things you will recognize without being so vague that you can't
remember where a particular image is. Once you have a general structure
setup, start getting specific by including names and dates.
The next thing to start thinking about is how to back up your images.
CD's and DVD's are OK short term solutions, but they can get lost,
stolen or damaged much easier than other methods. How to burn a CD
or DVD is specific to the software
you are using to burn. For a tutorial, click here.
Most pros have several backups in place, such as multiple
internal and external hard drives as well as possibly backing up to a remote
server. The main thing to remember is to backup regularly so that if catastrophe
happens, you don't loose your images; don't put all your chickens into one basket.
Removable USB or Firewire Hard Drives are good inexpensive solutions.
Even if you don't think you will ever use your images on a website, start naming
things as though you will. Even though renaming is easy as pie, it still takes
time to do, and that's time you may not have. So start naming things properly
for ease of finding, and for web integration. This means:
No spaces in the names. If you need to seperate words, use a hyphen - or an underscore
_.
No special characters like ",',!,@,#,$... if it can be used in programming,
it has no place in your names.
Start using dates with year and month in your names. Helps identify last year's
company picnic from this year's.
Apply these rules to your folder names as well.
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