So, you've been on an overseas holiday and taken dozens of photographs of the numerous sights you've seen and some of the people you've met. Now that you're back home, you decide to copy them from your camera's storage card to your computer.

There are several ways you can do this and almost every camera comes with a CD containing a software program that helps you manage your images. They do a variety of things such as letting you get rid of red eye, reduce the size, lighten and darken contrast, create fancy edges, and much more depending on the program.

Most digital cameras come complete with a small cable that has a USB connection on one end and a special connector on the other end that connects to your camera. There are different sizes and varieties of these connections depending on your camera make and type, but the one you have should connect to your camera and, as USB ports are relatively standard, will usually connect to your PC.

When you've loaded and fire up the software program provided with your camera, it will "find" the USB/Camera connection and offer you a dialogue box with several options. One will be to download the images from your camera to your computer. You usually need to keep your camera switched on when you download these images. With a large number of images, the time it takes can deplete your batteries, but you can overcome this problem if you have a connection between your household electricity supply and the camera so that the battery is bypassed.

A better option for you to consider is to buy a card reader. These allow you to take the storage (memory) card from your camera and slide it into a slot in the reader. You then connect the reader to the computer and download from the card instead of directly from the camera. This has several advantages.

Advantages include, you don't need to use your camera to effect the file transfer. It's quick and you can stick multiple cards into the reader ie, if you have five storage cards, you can use the card reader to successively read and download from every card. Also, if your software program is properly configured, after download, you can delete the original files on the cards saving you the task of doing it later.

Card readers come in three formats. A multiple card reader, as the name suggests, has multiple slots to take different size cards. This is useful if you have cameras with different size cards, but is of no real benefit if you only use one size card. So you can buy a card reader with one slot for the card size you have, buy a multiple card reader, or the final option is a device like a USB memory stick that has a slot in it for a memory card. The latter are useful for travelling as they take up little space and don't require a USB cable as they connect directly to your computer.

All of these reading devices are fairly inexpensive and are a great asset to assist you downloading your photographic images to your computer. Unfortunately, they don't work with the internal memory of your camera for which you still need to use the camera to computer connection cable.

The next item in this series discusses digital graphic size and composition and how to prepare them for email or Internet use.

Copyright 2006 Robin Henry