It's important to transfer digital photos off your camera's memory card
It’s not easy to choose which pictures to keep or to discard just by viewing them on your digial camera’s LCD screen. Eventually, no matter how large the storage space is on your camera’s memory card, you’ll run out of room. And a digital camera memory card is NOT ideal for long-term storage of your digital images.
3 Ways to Transfer Photos
Instead, get the digital photos off the digital camera memory card in 1 of 3 ways:
- Connect the digital camera to your computer with a USB cable. Using the USB cable that came with your digital camera, transfer the digital pictures from the camera’s memory card into a My Pictures folder on your computer.
- Use your digital camera’s docking station to transfer files. Some digital cameras, like the Kodak models, have docking stations that you hook up to the computer once, and then when you need to download digital images, you just put the digital camera on the docking stand, and click a button to transfer your digital images off the memory card.
- Transfer the digital images to another memory card, or to the computer with a memory card reader. The card reader is a small, USB device that hooks up to your computer, and quickly copies the digital photos from the digital camera memory card to your computer or to other memory card formats.
Once you’ve transferred the digital photos, and before using the “delete all” or “format” function to clear off your digital camera memory card, verify that your digital images are indeed on the computer, or in the card read, as delete and format are irreversible processes with most memory cards.
Back up, back up, back up
Remember, whenever you copy your digital pictures, make sure you create a back up copy of the digital images onto a CD. Computers are not infallible, and if they fail, you could lose many digital memories.
Now that all the transfer work is complete, you can safely view your digital images on the computer, and decide which to delete and which to keep, and edit if necessary.
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