Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #484 12/18/2019


Question: How do I get my pictures off my camera?

Answer:

There are multiple ways you can move your pictures from most digital cameras to your computers depending on the camera. You could use a cable, move the card or using wi-fi.

The way that I prefer using a USB cable you connect your camera to your computer. The higher end cameras use a USB mini cable and the lower priced (and smaller) cameras often use a USB micro cable. Generally, these are generic cables with the USB mini also being used to connect other devices to your PC and the USB micro used to connect phoned to the computer and chargers. Once you connect the cable between the devices and the camera is on you will see it listed as another disk type drive in File Explorer (the folder icon) in Windows. When you look in it you will need to go in the subfolders and pictures are usually in a folder called DCIM. They appear there the same as on a disk drive. You can then copy and paste them from that drive to the computer hard drive as you would move items on the computer hard drive.

The second way is to take the SIM card out of your camera and insert it in the card reader in your computer. Laptops often have built in card readers or you can buy card readers to connect to a USB port. Then you will work with the card using File Explorer as I explained using the USB cable. Then put the card back in the camera.

The third way is available on newer cameras and is using Wi-fi. You can do a connection on wi-fi using NFC to transfer pictures from the camera to a phone. To use NFC the devices must be near each other. I have not tried this yet as I have not wanted to move pictures from camera to my phone.

Once you have the pictures on your computer you can edit them with photo editing software, upload them to the Internet and print them.

I would encourage you to also save your pictures to a second hard drive or to a CD/DVD or flash drive as a back so if the drive fails or malware gets on your computer you still have your pictures.