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Zoombrowser EX

When it comes to making good holiday snaps the world and his wife have gone digital.

The work after you have pressed the shutter button is just as important for producing a good photographic print as how you used the camera to make the photograph.

There are all sorts of ways of getting digital photographs from your camera onto your personal computer’s hard drive. Connecting the camera via USB cable is one way, but will often require the camera’s driver to be installed on the computer, and removing the camera’s memory card is another.

Then there’s the question of whether to copy and paste, through your computer’s operating system, using its camera wizard to do the job for you, using third party software, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, or using what comes with the camera.

Zoom in on Cannon

Canon, one of the largest and best camera manufacturers, includes a piece of software called Zoombrowser EX which comes free with every camera. Its functionality is second to none.

Once installed, you’ll find Zoombrowser EX under Start>All Programs>Canon Utilities>Zoombrowser EX in Windows.

To save camera batteries, removed the memory card and place it into yours computer’s card reader. If it does not have one built in you can buy multi card readers for a reasonable price from electrical stores.

In Zoombrowser EX click Acquire & Camera Settings>Acquire Images from Memory Card and a window will pop up. Click Preferences . . . for another window that allows you to select whether to download only new images, or all images, on the card, where to save them, select a folder name and file structure and what actions to take after the photographs are downloaded. Click OK.

Download your photos

Download Images will download all images not previously downloaded to your machine, or download selected images by clicking the Lets you select and download images button. If you want to print directly from the memory card, without downloading any images, select the Print Menu button.

It’s best to download all the photos, so that you can view them on a large computer screen, and decide which ones you want do delete from there.

Once your images are downloaded click All Folders in the bottom left of the main Zoombrowser screen and select the folder containing the photos that you want to work with.

Double click your mouse on the first image and a new window will pop up containing it. Use the green arrow keys in the top left of the window to browse what you have just downloaded; hitting the Delete key on your keyboard for any you want to get rid of. Remember, if you delete a picture by accident it will be in the Recycle Bin on your computers desktop and it’s easy enough to recover.

Rename your photos

Once you have deleted any pictures that are superfluous it’s time to rename your pictures so that they are easy to find. Click on the first with your mouse and, holding shift, highlight the whole set. Under View and Classify click Rename Multiple Files and type in the date. If you want them to display in the correct order use the year month day format, so January 1, 2011 becomes 2011-01-01. Click Finish and all the files will be renamed with the first being 2011-01-01_0001 and the second 2011-01-01_0001.

Now you can use Zoombrowser, or Windows, to create new folder in your Pictures folder to help keep them sorted.

The most important thing is what works for you, anyone else who uses the machine.