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Getting your photos from camera to PC.
You can transfer your images by the wire and the software provided with your camera (or wirelessly if you have one of the latest cameras) but that uses up the camera battery and it is slower than using a Card Reader. If your PC is new-ish it may well have a reader built in. If not, one that plugs into a USB2 (Universal Serial Bus version 2) socket on your PC cost very few pounds now.
Tip: Get one that reads as many different types of memory card as possible (for little or no more) because that way you will be able to read those of friends and relatives when you particularly want a shot they got and you didn’t.
Usually the Reader is recognized as soon as you plug the card into it and this multi-choice dialogue box opens. Ignore all choices but the first which will hold your hand while you copy them to the My Pictures folder (which already exists). There are good reasons to keep your photos in the My Pictures folder as in the View Menu you can choose to view your photos as Filmstrip (i.e.) thumb nails but with the selected picture enlarged. This enables you to rotate those shots that are the wrong way round (takes but a click on this page) and to check out just how good your pictures are and get rid of the duff ones prior to anybody seeing them and before you waste too much time on them. The Details view gives you the name and size of the file, the picture dimensions, the date it was taken, the date of any modifications and more. Along side in the Task Pane there is Get pictures from camera for those who want to do it ‘manually’ and View as a Slide Show ( oh, go on, you might as well).
And then there is Order Prints Online (from a choice of companies); and Print Pictures (anything from lots of pictures on each page through to full-page prints, though the previous choice will be cheaper; and then low and behold Copy items to CD (all selected that is). Click on any of these and a wizard opens that will guide you through each process.
Keeping your digitized pictures safe. Some people think they will store them on CDs or DVDs but if you have anything like the number the average photographer has, not only would the number disks required be humendous, the time involved in burning your collection would be inordinate. Large capacity hard drives are quicker, more reliable and getting cheaper by the day. A good job too, because if you intend sharing your photos with others on disk, or by e-mail, or by putting them on the web, you are going to have to reformat and resize your picture files to screen size images, which means you are going to need even more digital space for them. But think of the physical space it will gain, that the film took up. Just what are you going to do that?
Well because digital media can fail, be it CDs, DVDs and yes even Hard Disks, professionals reckon you need to have copies of your photos in three places to be sure you won’t lose them. Your PCs your first. And if you back up to a plug-in external drive as I would recommend, that you keep away from your PC for extra security, that’s a second.  (A bonus of this being that you could take it where ever you go and show your images on any PC.) A very good third could be the space you just saved! Store the film you thought you were going to dump, safe from light and damp not just because all digital media can fail but because who knows what technological advances will have been made ten years from now? You may have to do it all again, in 3D.
There is another reason for not giving up on film and that is because digital cameras fail miserably in one area that the camera makers don’t want you to know about. Sorry if you just bought that multi-megapixel, anti-shake, face spotting camera they told you was all singing and all dancing because it isn’t. Convenient they may be but digital cameras cannot cope with the light and dark areas of a scene, but you’ll be pretty much all right in this country where more days are miserable than not. When the sun is out however and the contrasts strong you just won’t be able to capture the detail at either end of the scale. You might think photo editors could solve the problem but it isn’t that easy. You can try and may get a little more detail from the dark areas but the white areas will stay white and both will be impaired. (There are ways round the problem, if you are willing to take lots of different exposures of the same scene from exactly the same places and then spend the time with advanced software to blend them together. You want to do that? You have the time?)
Film does a far better job at these extremes, not as good as the human eye, but better than digital. In that film you were going to throw away there is probably lots of detail you hadn’t realized was there, just waiting to be brought out, once it is digitized. So keep your old film camera and a few rolls of unused film handy (it will last ‘forever’ in an airtight container in the fridge) and the next time the sun shines bright, remember it. Digital cameras are improving all the time but it will probably be a while before they solve this problem. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Then there’s the job of organizing all your photos... Groan. (You may groan as well, but that one’s mine.) The sooner you begin the easier it is, especially if you start simply. It will help avoid the confusion and disorder that can so easily develop. You can subsequently refine your system as you go along. Depending on the size of your collection, start doing it by decade; and later by year; and then may be by season, but at some point we are going to have to name the files in such a way that they will better remind us of what they are e.g. with the subject name and date. I can feel another groan coming on but it isn’t that bad. Not if we use some assisting software to rename and date in bulk with for instance: Blackpool Sept68 001, Blackpool Sept68 002, Blackpool Sept68 003 and so on.
It can be done quickly and easily by dealing with the whole lot at a time (batch processing). Without any costly, overblown image editing  software, and without much more than a click of a button. WINDOWS can do it, just, but DIGITAL IMAGE TOOL is a small, simple to use program that can do that and a whole lot more besides.
In it, first you select the folder and picture files you want to work on, the format you want to save them in: jpeg, bmp or the better, to be recommended tiff format, and the new folder in which the modified pictures are to be placed. You then choose their quality with a slider whilst preview it just below. The program enables you to rename images with something memorable and to add an incremental number as a prefix or suffix. Resize pictures to suit the purpose in hand (including copying to CD), rescale them, rotate them, crop them, and add a watermark, globally or individually. You can put your settings into effect individually or all at once, at the click of one button and in less time than it takes to read this sentence! It does other things just as fast but you don’t want me to spoil it for you. Best of all it is free, however if you think it is as good as I do then you can make a donation via their web site. Eventually when you have nothing better to do, you might think it worth identifying your pics individually: Blackpool Sept68 pier 001, Blackpool Sept68 tower 002, Blackpool Sept68 Maureen 003 and so on. Or then again, you might not....
While you are at it, you might want to make your folder of photos more readily available too, by creating a desktop icon for it. That way it will be easy to drop new pix into it. Then you can just drag new image files on to the icon, let go and they will find there way into your ‘photo album’ (the folder) without you even having to opening it. To get photos out, just click on the icon and there they all are
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