Importing Photos

After a fourteen months of taking digital pictures, I still haven't found a great way to get them on to my computer. There a handful of issues that still don't make me happy. Let's go over all the image grabbers.

 

Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard. When I attach my camera to the computer with the USB cable this is one of the choices that pops up. It's actually really good at copying the images to the computer without too much UI getting in the way. It let's me create a direction without making me hunt all over my hard drive. I can set a file prefix, but it has a fatal flaw. It puts a space in the filename after the prefix and before the number. Ug. Spaces suck in filenames. It ignores the original image name which I'm not yet sure if I want that. The selection GUI doesn't have a fast group select, so if I only want half the images on the camera I need to click 3 million times to select them. It's actually fast to copy all the images over and then delete them. This isn't actually something I need to do a lot, but sometimes I forget to delete the images after I copy them so I end up with photos from the previous outing. You can preview the images as you copy them which is kind of nice. Do you know what a RAW files is? Well this program doesn't so it skips those.

 

Canon ZoomBrowser for the S400 ELF. This program has way to much GUI and ever time I click a button it take a few seconds for it to do something. It lets you create a directory and file prefix and it's nice enough not to add any spaces in the filename. This program doesn't handle raw files either.

 

EOSViewerUtility. This is the program that came with my 20D. Canon needs to hire some software engineers, because like ZoomBrowser the UI on this program really stinks. I have to open the folders on my camera's flash card. Don't forget every click in the program take a few seconds. My camera has this stupid feature where it puts every 100 photos in separate directories. Huh? How is that ever useful? It just make it annoying to take photos off that span directories. So after I navigate down to a directory on the flash card, I have to select all the photos and drag them to a directory in the program. Oh, I hope I remembered to create the destination directory first.

 

Photoshop. I love Photoshop for most things, but mass importing images isn't one of them. It forces you to open all the pictures in Photoshop which is really slow. I might be able to create an action or a batch job to do this, but don't think that would be much better. Photoshop takes too long to boot when all I want to do is import.

 

Copy by hand. So far all of these programs work with cameras, but they don't work well with a USB card reader. In either case I can just copy this files by hand. This actually isn't too bad, but I hate navigating directories. I have to go to my photos and create a directory. Then I have to navigate all the stupid directories on the flash card.

 

Picasa. This is my current choice. It's actually copying some photos right now. You load Picasa and click one button. Yes, one button. It figures out if you have a camera attached or a USB reader and starts copying automatically. Then I come back in a while to specify the directory name. It has a couple problems. You can't use a viewer on the photos while they're being copied. I not sure where it puts them. The other problem is that it's really slow with lots of pictures. It's been going for 30 minutes on the current batch of photos. It seems to slow down after while. Maybe it puts them all in memory and 1 gig of memory causes it to swap. Nope, just looked. Only using 50 megs. Well, it's still really slow.

 

I should do a web search for a better tool. I'm sure some geek has had the same problems as me and made a simple tool that just does exactly what I want.

 

I still haven't figured out how to name files. Currently I use the IMG_1234.jpg name that the camera produces. This is ok but I have two camera that use the same naming convention so they names collide. That doesn't seem like it's a good solution in the long run.

 

None of these image capture utilities autorotate the jpgs. The images have a little tag in them that says "I need to be rotated when viewed". Microsoft's thumbnail viewer doesn't know about this tag, so all the vertical thumbnails are sideways. If you use the Microsoft rotator utility, it doesn't remove the tag, so all the other programs then have the image sideways. Canon's fileviewer utility will autorotate all the images in a directory (without telling you) when you are browsing with it and it's smart enough to remove the tag. It actually took me a long time to figure out why all my images were randomly rotating when I used these two programs together. I just want the imported to auto rotate the image and remove the tag.

 

By the way, did you know that you can actually rotate jpgs without losing any image quality? You can numerically rotate the image without actually rendering and recompressing it. A lot of tools will do this for you  so there is no reason to not rotate all your jpg photos.

 

So when should I delete the images off the flash card? I've been doing this after I review the photos to make sure they copied correctly, but every now and then I forget.

 

Well, I was going to talk about image viewing utilities too, but this ranty blogs is long enough.