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Now I would like to show you how to import images on to your drive using the
Adobe Photo Downloader. You can access the images from your media card by
connecting the digital camera with the card inserted in it to an open USB port
on your computer or by connecting a USB card reader that is specific to the
type of media card you're using, such as Compact Flash or SD.
After you connect the camera or card reader to your computer you can access the
images from your media card using the Adobe Photo Downloader. I currently have
my digital camera already connected to this computer. Now I would like to
download the images from the media card on to my drive. I'm going to do so from
the Bridge application, which I currently already have launched.
You can see it here on my screen and what I would like to do is go under the
File menu and choose Get Photos from Camera. We will go ahead and choose that
option and when we do you will see this warning dialog box saying,
"Do you want Photo Downloader to automatically launch whenever a camera or a card
reader is connected?" and this option can be changed later via preferences.
So this is good information to know; what this means is, if we choose to do this
by clicking on Yes button, that any time we hook up our camera to the computer
that we will be using Elements and Adobe Bridge in order to download our images.
And that is what I suggest you do. It is possible that you may have some other
applications installed on your computer that allow you do the very exact
same thing only not using Elements or Bridge. So if you have your preferences set
up on your computer to use another application then I would recommended saying
No to those preferences in those applications and say Yes here. And that's
what we're going to do, we're actually going to click on the Yes button and here
we have the Adobe Bridge Photo Downloader dialog box. You can see here, up
at the top, it says Get Photos From and it is recognizing my camera, which is
currently hooked up to the computer. It is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel Xti. You can
click in here and you could see this is the only one hooked up, that's the
only one that's appearing and that is okay. This is the one that we're going to work with.
Right so it is already telling us what is seeing on the card that's
inserted in the camera and hooked up to the computer, 17 files and they total
up to 56 MB of file space. It's giving us the date on which they were shot
and we have these settings down here. Location, this is where you're choosing to
save the files on your system. Currently, it's defaulting to your Pictures
folder and that is actually not a bad place to store your pictures, but it's
entirely up to you where you want to store your images and how you want to categorize
them. I do recommend that every time you import images that you save
them into a subfolder inside of the Pictures folder. You can choose to name the
folder however you like; if you want to, you can click the Choose button,
choose a different location. It could be your Desktop, it could be your
Documents folder, it could be anywhere you would like on your drive. I think that
Pictures is probably the most obvious and best place to choose. I'm going
to go ahead and click Cancel here. All right, you can also choose to create other
subfolders based on Date, Shot Date, or Today's Date. You can also choose
a custom name if you would like to, maybe name it Date and Event. Maybe it's the
day that you took the shots and the type of the content that is in the images
themselves; maybe pictures from a birthday party or any other kind of event.
I just have some pictures in here of the harbor over here at the hotel where I'm
actually staying and if I wanted to I could name these Harbor Shots and then maybe
today's date, that's a one way to do it if you're going to custom name.
Hey! I'm actually going to just keep it the way it's set now just by Shot Date,
but I wanted to mention that you're not limited to just this option; if you
want to you can actually type in any name you want for the sub folder. We can
also choose to rename the files. If you don't rename the files they are going
to stay named exactly the way your camera chooses to name them. That may or
may not be a good thing. I think when you're trying to locate images later,
it makes more sense if you name them by Shot Date or if you choose Custom Name,
again, like we did with the Create Subfolders or like you can with the Create
Subfolders option. Or include both, Shot Date and Custom Name. Let me just go
ahead and just choose that and I can enter the custom name in here, maybe
something like harbor. And then of course, it will have a number after each shot
indicating the serial of each one. All right, I want to show you also that we
can choose to work with an Advanced dialog box by clicking the Advanced Dialog
button in the lower left corner. The advantage to working with this dialog
box is that you can choose specific images that you want to download from the
card. All right, now, this is especially helpful if you're the kind of person
that downloads images from a card and then leaves them on the card and
then takes more images using the camera and then when you want to download
the new images that you have taken, but you don't want to download duplicated
of the other images that are still on the card. You can, of course, turn off those
images. So if I wanted to I could go here and uncheck the ones that I don't
want to download. So that's one of the benefits to using this
feature. Of course, you can always check all or uncheck all; I'm going to go
ahead and check all again and that places check marks into all of the check boxes.
We can now download all of these images at once. All right, over here,
we have Advanced Options. We can open Adobe Bridge as soon as we're downloading
the images and I recommend that you keep that turned on because then you can
preview all the images in Bridge, decide which ones that you may want to work
with in Elements. You could also convert to DNG that's a different
file format; that's a standard format that is something you may want to consider
doing when you're working with Camera Raw files and we will be talking
about those in much greater detail in a much later movie. You can also save copies
if you like by clicking on this option and, of course, you can choose their
location as well. I'm not going to do that. You can also apply metadata by using a Metadata
Template. This is information that's stored inside of the file having to
do with the camera setup and how the image was taken. You can set up a template
inside of Bridge to use, but in this instance we're just going to stick with the
basic Metadata Template. Hey! You can also enter in Author information,
we will put in my name and Copyright you can type in 2008 something like
that if you have any other company name you want to throw in there you
can, but generally just the year is fine. Click Get Photos and when you do that it is
going to go through and download the images in to the location that
you specified in the top of the dialog box, and there it is going through
bringing all of those images in and there they are, because we had the Open Adobe
Bridge option turned on we're now viewing those images. It's going through and
caching the preview, because I have it set to a high quality preview preference.
So you can actually see these looking really, really nice inside of Adobe Bridge.
So basically that is all you need to do in order to import your images
using the Adobe Photo Downloader. As soon as you have your camera hooked up if
you turn on the preference to automatically launch the Downloader it should
appear, you can set up all of your options inside of the dialog box and then
click Download.