Copying photos from your digital camera or memory card to your PC using Windows XP's Camera & Picture wizard
Windows has a ‘wizard’ to help you copy photos from your digital camera or memory card to your computer. It runs automatically – you just have to either connect your camera to your PC or insert your memory card into your card reader.
First, connect your camera to your PC using the USB lead that came with your camera (or the dock/cradle if you have one). You can also take the memory card out of your camera and put it into a USB card reader - it's up to you: both methods work the same way.
If you connected your camera directly, you'll probably see the screen shown below on the left; if you put your memory card into a card reader, you'll probably see the screen shown below on the right:
Select either "Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard" or "Copy pictures to a folder on my computer", whichever you see - highlighted in red in the screenshots above.
You'll see the "Reading picture information" window (below) while your PC checks through your pictures. The screen may flash up for a couple of seconds if you don't have many photos, or it may stay onscreen for a minute or two if you have lots of photos... just wait for it to close: the wizard will progress automatically.
Next you'll see the "Welcome to the Scanner and Camera Wizard" window shown below - just click Next:
All of the pictures on memory card are now displayed on the Choose Pictures to Copy page as shown below.
By default, all of the pictures are selected. Click Next if you want to copy all of the photos in one go.
Useful tip: If you have pictures of two or three different events (say, one set of photos of your holiday to France, one set of photos from a family wedding, and another set of photos of things you’re going to sell on eBay) you should click Clear All to deselect all of the pictures, and then place a tick beside all of the photos from one event (your holiday to France), and then click Next with just those selected - you can come back for the rest later.
On the Picture Name and Destination page, type a name for the group of pictures.
The name you enter here will be given to each of the pictures you copy from your camera, followed by a number - so with the holiday to France example, if you were to type "March trip to France", the pictures will be named "March trip to France 001," "March trip to France 002," and so on.
Windows will create a new folder in your My Pictures folder (which is in My Documents) with the name "March trip to France", so you can see why it's useful to copy photos in batches and give them each a relevant name.
Before you press Next, tick the box "Delete pictures from my device after copying them": this will free up space on your camera, and also mean that you can process the next group of pictures without having to deselect the ones you've already done. Pictures will only be deleted from your camera after they have been copied to your PC, don't worry!
As the photos are copied from your camera and to your PC, you'll see this screen. There's nothing that you need to do - just wait for the wizard to process your images.
When all of your photos have been copied, you'll see this screen:
Just select "Nothing, I'm finished working with these pictures", and then Next and then Finish.
If you just copied a selection of the photos on your memory card, you can now go back to the beginning and repeat the process for the next group of pictures (eg, you've done your holiday to France, now copy the photos of items you're going to sell on eBay).
The easiest way to get back to restart the wizard is to disconnect your camera or memory card, and then connect it back after a few seconds. The wizard will start again and you can follow these notes through again.
