10 January 2012

Retrieving pictures from multiple folders

That there is 214 folders. You, Canon 350D sir, are an arse.

If you take a lot of photos (say, a couple of thousand while time-lapse shooting) one of those chief face-palm moments is when you pop the memory card into your computer, and find the camera has sorted your tidy sequence of photos into lots of folders. Hundreds of folders. Going back and forth copying a folder of images at a time is not my idea of being productive. Lucky, then, there's a standard application in Mac OS X that can do this for you.

Image Capture (found in the Applications folder, naturally) can be used to copy content from a memory card or a camera. It doesn't browse the folder structure like the Finder, instead it lists all the media files together (photos, video etc.), allowing you to select the batch you want and instruct it to copy to a destination of your choosing. No back-and-forthing required.

(Incidentally, iPhoto also does this in a roundabout way, but I find iPhoto to be a bit slow when loading up my entire photo library, which it insists on doing upon launching, whereas Image Capture is a relatively lightweight app and just gets on with it.)


Simply open Image Capture, tell it to Download Some, switch to list view, and tell it where to copy your images by way of the Download Folder setting. Voila, all your images in one folder by way of a few mouse clicks rather than millions and gabillions.

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