Bedrock

A conversation the other night triggered me off – what to do with the many photos we take?

At one time the answer was simple – get them developed at Boots and shove them away in a cupboard for posterity or bore the pants off everyone with a large selection of holiday pics of varying quality.

Today all of that has changed, there are very few reasons to have poor pictures (or at least to keep them) and a myriad of ways to store and present them.

Getting photos from the camera to your PC or tablet:

So we’ve taken some photos – how do we get the photos OFF THE CAMERA? That depends a lot on the equipment. Often, you can either plug the camera into your PC with a USB lead at which point it becomes a “disk” from which you can just copy the photos… perhaps you may need an adaptor to copy the images from your camera’s SD disk to the computer, tablet or phone, there are many options depending on your camera and what kind of machine you want to copy the images to.

Apple products are the least flexible in this respect however it’s quite easy given an adaptor like this… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mammoth-XT-Reader-Connection-Adapter/dp/B00CL9FLTI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406559819&sr=8-1&keywords=apple+2+sd+adaptor

At under £3 this one isn’t going to drain the bank account – there are others and the prices vary – check out to ensure the device does what you need before getting the credit card out.

Similarly there are many usb-type adaptors for Android tablets – but often these days, cameras use Micro-SD which is the same as the tablet uses.  Further upmarket you can purchase a device that will talk to your tablet or phone wirelessly to transfer photos.

The same argument goes for a PC – there are many adaptors out there that will plug straight into a USB adaptor on the PC – indeed many PCs have their own SD and similar adaptors.

If your camera supports wireless (WIFI) operation then so much the better – no need for leads – but note that modern photos can be quite large and it is often the case that copying from an SD or similar card is the fastest way.

Personally, both my camera and phone support WIFI and Dropbox and hence I copy the images on the device straight to Dropbox – shortly thereafter, they appear on my PC or tablet.

Sharing photos:

So now you have your photos on the tablet or PC  – what if you want to share images with others? For single images, one options is again Dropbox, whether you want to share photos around your own devices or share with others, Dropbox will solve that one for you . It is free for a certain amount of storage – if you want more you pay for more. There are alternatives, Google have Google Drive and Microsoft have their own free storage – I find Dropbox to be the most convenient. Clearly for lots of photos or entire albums this is not ideal and another solution is suggested later on.

Then there is the matter of editing and storing somewhere. It’s never a good idea to store pictures on your PC – what happens if it breaks – and sure as eggs it WILL BREAK some day. One great option combining editing AND storage is Google’s free Picasa.  This is a tool that lets you edit pictures with ease and speed  (sadly not yet available on most tablets) you can then if you like save them in Dropbox OR you can automatically sync with Google’s own storage “Google Drive” – if you do that on a PC, you can also make these available on your phone – certainly, Android phones make this particularly easy. One online social tool that makes use of your Google storage is Google+ and that’s a great way to display your albums. Another online tool is Flickr –and the latter offers an obscene amount of online storage for free.

Editing photos:

In terms of editing, PCs have a WEALTH of editing tools – Mac users have fewer but still quality tools. Phones and tablets as yet still have very basic tools by comparison – and yet, I have to say that the likes of the Samsung phone makes HDR photography much easier than anything I’ve seen on a PC to date – and that includes the likes of the PC package PhotoMatrix which generates good HDR pics easily – but not as easily as the phone.  In terms of ease of use I won’t even start discussing Photoshop and Gimp in depth as they’re not trivial to use – though I use Gimp myself. For quick editing, Picasa on a PC is hard to beat. If you really want to get deeply into editing – take a look at Gimp – it’s free and powerful.

And finally – want to edit online without loading any tools? Take a look at PIXLR

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