Photo Tips

In the last photo tip we talked about the basics of how images get to a media device and then become ready to be imported or copied to your computer. In this discussion we will talk about a few ways this is done but rest assured that there are many different ways that different applications treat this process. Once you have an exposed media card out of the camera and into a reading device that is connected to your computer, you will see the icon for this media appear on your desktop. This media can be treated (as it is) a storage device that the images can simply be copied from and dropped to another location on the computer. The Mac users refer to this technique as dragging and dropping. Dragging the images from the card and then dropping them the computer.

This is a primitive but fairly effective way of accomplishing moving images from one location to another, but it has its problems. For instance if you wanted to rename the files or send duplicates to a back up location you would have to build these into separate steps in your workflow. Now we all know the name of the game is Keep It Simple Stupid. Well Adobe has addressed many of these issues with Lightroom and Bridge.

As pictured here you can see that both interfaces have many of the same features but are just located in different locations or called something slightly different. As we look at each interface we can see all of the things that can be done once the options have been selected. Let’s take a moment to look over some of the features. Now that we’ve looked over the interface let’s think about what happens. Whether you run Lightroom or Bridge you will need to tell the application to launch its downloader upon insertion of media card. Once this has been done, you should see the choose interface appear automatically when you insert a media card into the computer.