Import Photos from SD Card directly into GraphicConverter?

If you've been paying close attention to your Mac, you'll realize you're wrong when you say that "nothing happens" after you insert the sdcard into your computer. What happens is that the card shows up as an external device, basically looking just like an external hard disk (which it really is, just very tiny). That means you can use just about any program to dig through the pics and find those you want, including simply using the "Attach File" feature in Apple Mail to find and include the images.

I never send raw images to other people, however, partially because the files tend to be way bigger than needed and partially because I always like the chance to adjust, tweak and crop them to emphasize what I want them to see.

For these sort of tasks, I turn to a long-time favorite shareware app of mine: GraphicConverter. If you don't have it, download it and register it. It's terrific!

Here's how I would work within GraphicConverter to find and open up an image from my camera's sdcard... starting with choosing "Open" from the "File" menu:

Now look on the left side of the Open File dialog window and you should see your sdcard. It might be listed with the vendor name, as mine is with CANON_DC:

Click on it and you'll find that most cameras have things set up in a completely obscure and confusing fashion:

My secret tip for dealing with this is to click on "Date Modified" so that you can have it sorted most-recent to oldest. With that done, you can see that the DCIM subfolder "106__12" contains my latest photos.

DCIM, by the way, is supposed to stand for "digital camera image management", but that's probably neither here nor there for this process!

I click on the "106__12" folder and there are my three photos within:

In GraphicConverter, I can easily select all three with a combination of click and cmd-click, then click on the "Open" button and they're all displayed on the computer. Easy.

Oh, and one handy hint. In any GraphicConverter window, you can always see the full path of the image you're viewing by using cmd-click on the image name in the title bar, as I show here:

Done with the images? Just save it to the desktop and you're ready to email!

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