Digital Camera

If I remember well, Tony has a Canon PowerShot S300 Digital ELPH (Ixus V in EU). I was just wondering if it is seen as a removable device in Windows 2000 when plugged in via USB, without adding software of any sort. Tony (or anybody else who has the same camera), can you help please?

Thank you as usual!

I don't have the same camera, or Windows 2000, but I have a Sony DSC-505V and Windows XP. I never had to load a driver for XP to see it as a removable device thru USB... Hope this helps...

edit The Sony camera shows up as a Sony Memory Stick under my computer when connected, at which time I can just grab the files off the memory stick and edit with the software of my chioce (Paintshop Pro 7)

I don't think it works like that. I don't have the same camera, but I have a Canon and from what I read of his posts it works the same way. You have to install their crappy piece of software (or one of the ones other people use) to get the pictures off.

That's why I bought a little SanDisk CF card reader. That does work that way. I never connect my camera to my computer now.

ACDSee Systems have a viewer which lets you acquire images direct from the camera. It covers a great range of cameras already and has a 30 day trial. They probably have new drivers for newer cameras available on their site.

main thing with the slightly naff Canon software,
its FREE!!

Last time we had this discussion (particularly with Tony), I recommended Breezebrowser. I think it's a great piece of software, but Tony didn't like it because it was just another viewer. What he was looking for was something to replace the crappy Canon software you need just to get pics off the camera.

Well, since that discussion, the guy that develops BreezeBrowser has developed a downloader utility that supposedly works well. I haven't tried it myself, but you might consider checking it out:

http://www.breezebrowser.com/G1/Downloader/index.htm

Thank you all guys! I eventually ordered the Ixus300. Even if the sw is bad, as long as I can get the pics off it's fine. I was mainly concerned with the camera size, and that should fit the Empeg case. Also, ACDSee should be able to download pics of the Canon as well. Has anybody tried?

It may be free but it's also terrible.

Even if the sw is bad, as long as I can get the pics off it's fine.

That was the conclusion I reached, as well.

The software isn't bad, it's just not the best software in the world. It does a perfectly fine job of grabbing the images off the camera. My only complaint was that the installation CD doesn't make it clear which programs you can "skip" so that you install as little crap as possible. Just so you know when you get the camera, the only program you need is called ZoomBrowser, and you can bin the rest of it.

Great to know. I'll install just that and do all photo editing and archiving with other software. Thank you Tony.

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but have you checked out cam2pc, Tony? I just downloaded their free version to help my wife use the digital camera easier and it seems like it might fit the bill of what you're looking for (not precisely, but close), and it claims to support your S110.

Wow! This is old

I'd be interested if you were still using Zoombrowser, Tony. I'm amazed you ended up using it. I've enjoyed simply being able to pull pictures off my card directly. I can't stand intermediary programs like Zoombrowser. It's like using Real software to load your MP3's onto your portable

I'd be interested if you were still using Zoombrowser, Tony. I'm amazed you ended up using it. I've enjoyed simply being able to pull pictures off my card directly. I can't stand intermediary programs like Zoombrowser.

Not all intermediary programs are junk. Downloader Pro which was mentioned earlier in this thread for example is very useful.

It copies the images from the CF card, rotates them losslessly (using exif data), embeds colour profiles if needed, sets the DPI in the images to a sensible value, sets the timestamp on the images to match the shooting time, stores them away in a directory structure you choose (based on data related to each image and text you enter when it starts downloading) and then deletes the images from the CF card when it finished.

It can helpfully, if wanted, hook into XP media events meaning that this series of tasks kicks off as soon as I put my CF card into my laptop after a shooting session.

If Downloader Pro didn't exist I'd have to write it myself...

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but have you checked out cam2pc, Tony?

Since I got inexpensive CompactFlash readers for both my home PC and work PC, I no longer need nor care about downloader and cataloger software. Gimme my loose files on a drive letter, that's all I care about. Done deal.

I bet you've knocked up your own script/tools for putting each set of images where you want though ?

Nope. Just open up a couple of explorer windows and drag and drop. I don't have a complex organization scheme, just a few folders on a hard disk.

Just open up a couple of explorer windows and drag and drop

Ditto. Just a matter of using the annoying preview pane to see where each occasion spans, and dragging it into appropriate folders.

I didn't mean to say all intermediary programs, but most of them, and pretty much every single one that comes with your camera or MP3 player. That's why 3rd party programs exist, because the shipped ones suck so badly

I've been using ZoomBrowser the whole time. The latest version is good enough to make a separate folder for every day of shooting. I then tack on my own annotations to the folder name (so "2004_02_08" becomes "2004_02_08-Sunset Pics") or something else similarly useful. Since I shoot in raw mode, I'm using Canon software to do the JPEG (or occasionally 16-bit TIFF) conversions. Again, it ain't the best, but it does mostly work. One of these days, I'll get off my duff and get Photoshop CS, with its own native converter that's supposed to be pretty good.

Also, like others here, I have a USB card reader which is much easier to use than the USB cable for the camera. Also, it makes it easy to burn CDs that are identical to the flash card filesystems. Then, I can insert those CDs later on and they look to the Canon software just like flash cards and can be easily re-imported.

I have to give props to Adobe Album 2.0. 1.0 was a little rough, but 2.0 is a very nice piece of software. I've not got time to go into detail now, but I wanted to mention it. It absolutely kills Zoombrowser.

-Zeke

I won't disagree. I only use ZoomBrowser long enough to convert my data from raw to JPEG. After that, I use other tools.

Which reminds me... I use Windows XP's picture handling stuff that's built into the File Explorer... and it's both good and awful at the same time. It's good that it can show thumbnails and do full-screen slideshows. It's just awful that it will mess up when computing the thumbnails and it will often screw up scrolling the thumbnails. And you can't do a slideshow while it's computing the thumbnails. Etc. ACDSee used to be good, way back when, but it seems now to be overloaded with features I don't care about. All I want to do is browse thumbnails (or browse images via the slideshow gadget) and be able to say "run Photoshop on that." Do I really need a third-party tool?

Rotating stuff in the XP built in photo viewer is bad as well because it'll strip the EXIF tags from the file. It's probably doing a lossy transform as well for the rotation.

I use jhead and jpegtran to do all the rotation of my photos. If you've got a camera that fills in the orientation field of the EXIF header then it'll automatically rotate the image for you.

ACDSee used to be good, way back when, but it seems now to be overloaded with features I don't care about.

Tell me about it, which is why I am still using ACDSee Classic, which doesn't have any of the useless new features and is about the fastest image viewer I know. It tends to be one of the first apps I install on any machine. It is particularly fast at switching backwards and forwards between two images in a row, which makes comparing two photos so you can keep the best painless. If only other photo views did what it does and cached the decoded copies of the previous jpeg in memory.

Unfortunately it is lacking at least one feature that I would like, it doesn't display EXIF data.

Has anyone here tried Irfanview for photo work? I install it on my Windows boxes to see images like .tga files and such, and it seems decent and simple for that. Never tried photo stuff with it though, since my camera only talks to iPhoto.

I have tried Irfanview a couple of times in the past, it is a very impressive bit of work for one guy to come up with. Something with it isn't quite right though, it just doesn'y "feel" right compared to ACDSee Classic. I can't remember my contrete complaints with what it did.

It does do a lot more than ACDSee Classic does though, but they weren't things I needed it to do.

It is definitely worth a look for someone unhappy with their current view though.

I used Irfanview for batch resizing for the web for a long while, until I realized that the resized files were much larger in file size than when I resized them and stored them at the same compression in Paint Shop Pro. It was disappointing because the batch processing was very nice, and I'm still looking for a program that will do it well.

Does ACDSee do it, Andy?

ps-oh, and I never used Irfanview for a viewer, so I don't know how it works for that.

ACDsee classic is merely a file viewer, it's not a batch resizer.

The best program I've seen for controlling the filesize/quality of JPEG images is "Ulead Smart Saver", it can work as a PaintShop Pro plugin quite nicely. Although it doesn't do resizing, you could do some kind of batch-resize operation in PaintShop and then group-process the photos with SmartSaver.

I wonder if the old Graphics Workshop guy is still making apps. Back in the day, it was the cool program for batch resizing. I'll go google.

Edit: Here he is: Alchemy Mindworks.

Thanks, Tony. While I normally, as a rule, avoid Ulead software, if you recommend it I'll give it a shot. And definitely like the PSP pugin aspect of it.

I'll also check out the program you suggested.