Downloading Photos and Videos [Mac OS X]

On Mac OS X, when you connect a device that contains photos, like a camera, phone, flash drive, SD card, etc, the default is for iPhoto to automatically open. But as I covered in a previous post, I do not like iPhoto and don't use it.

So now I am going to show you how to download your photos and videos from your devices.

Downloading

Go into your Applications folder and open up the "Image Capture" application.

Next, connect your camera device to your computer (phone, camera, SD card, flash drive, etc).

The device will show up on the list on the left side. If you click it, you will see the photos and videos on it.

First thing we want to do is set the default so that the Mac stops opening iPhoto when you connect this device and starts opening Image Capture instead. To do that, click on the device on the left hand pane. Then look at the bottom left and look for this:

If you do not see those option you may need to click the little box with the triangle in order to bring it up.

Select "Image Capture" from the "Connecting this camera opens" drop down menu. Also, please notice the "Delete after Import" check box on the bottom-left. This is pretty self explanatory. If you check that box prior to importing the photos, the import process will delete them from your device after it has successfully downloaded the photos. This is good to do if you want to clear up room on your device.

From this forward, connecting your device will force Image Capture to open instead of iPhoto.

Now it's time to download the photos.

Because I usually have several different events in my camera at once, I will download all my photos to a temporary folder, then I will sort them out accordingly after they are downloaded.

First select a folder where you want to download the photos to. You do so by clicking the "Import To:" button and selecting a location.

Image Capture will let you download all the photos at once, or alternatively you can select what photos/videos you want to download.

Option 1... If you want to download only select photos, select the individual photos by holding down the CMD key and clicking on the photos one at a time. Once you have selected them all, click on "Import".

Option 2... If you want to download all the photos in the device, simply click on "Import All".

Please pay close attention to which button you are going to press.  If you want to import only a few photos, but click the "Import All" button by mistake, you will import all the photos at once.

Image Capture will now download your photos and videos to the location you selected.

Once Image Capture has completed downloading all the photos and videos, go to the folder you downloaded them to. From there, you can move them to whatever folder you want. Hopefully you have read my previous post about organizing your photos.

In this next post, I will show you all about how install and configure Google's Picasa in order to manage and upload your photos to the cloud once you have downloaded them to your computer.