Managing Photos - Transferring From Your Camera

Most digital cameras on the market today come with software managers of some sort. They allow you do do a variety of photo manipulations depending on what gets packaged with the camera and who the manufacturer is. In general, most software that comes with our camera will allow for the basic; transferring images from your camera, basic photo editing, and perhaps some form of sharing or printing software.

The majority of beginners I have talked to find that working with their camera's transfer software can be very confusing. Especially if that person's abilities with a computer is uncertain. While the software that comes bundled does have good intentions, I notice that most of them shove images in sub, sub, sub folders that make it harder to find later when you are trying to upload an image to, say, a social web site or through your email. Suddenly it becomes a needle in a haystack.

For anyone that takes a lot of images (most anyone with a digital camera) I advise them to create their own folder structure for their images. Something that is not buried somewhere deep in their tree structure. I also advise them to get rid of their cumbersome image management software and rely on a simple, inexpensive device; a USB card reader.

Card readers plug right into any of your computer's USB ports and are accessed through your normal file manager. They are read as additional drives with their own drive letters and accept many of today's most commonly used memory cards. Simply pull the memory card out of your camera, insert it into the appropriate slot in the reader and open up your file manager. From there it's typical click and drag to get your images from the card to your computer. The nice thing is, you know where they are going so you will be able to find them later.