Moving Photos to a PC

[owdbert]

I have recently bought a Powershot A710IS and would be pleased to know if it is possible to transfer by removing the files from camera to a designated, or MY PICTURES folder. I can transfer them but the files remain on the camera card. OK - no great problem to delete but would prefer to remove at same time as transfer. Idiots guide would be appreciated. Owdbert.

[Robukincan]

I believe in the CameraWindow utility provided by Canon there's a setting in there ... it's in preferences or something like that ... you can set destination and theres a checkbox to erase the card after transfer

-Rob

[Graystar]

removed

[owdbert]

Thanks to both of you for the info -- all sorted.

[Jon]

Actually, I recommend you leave the photos on the card until you've verified that the pictures have transferred successfully. Sometimes they don't, and you'd lose the shots if you delete them right off. You don't need to delete the photos one-by-one; you can reformat the card very quickly and that's better than deleting the files since it also gets rid of now-empty directories as well.

[DigitalDisaster]

I have had a couple of occassions where the pic file that transferred to the computer had glitches in it. The file on the camera was fine and I was able to retransfer. If I had set it to auto delete I would have been out the picture. Once I've verified the pics on the computer are fine I just go to view the pictures on the camera, hit menu and scroll down to delete all and erase them at that point. Or one can format the card as Jon pointed out.

[Graystar]

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[Jon]

The problem is what "successfully transferred" means. It can't check the integrity of a transfer if the image is corrupted between the card and computer since it's susceptible to the same corruption every time the data's transferred.

[Graystar]

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[Jon]

I work with computers for a living and I must say...I've never heard of a file being read from a USB device where the computer failed to signal a problem, but the file was corrupt. For this to happen requires a hardware failure.

A flash card operates just like a hard drive. The interface protocols of storage devices are very mature, and error detection and even error correction is performed during transfers. But at the very least, the OS will signal a transfer problem and stop the process. There has to be something very wrong with the hardware in order for this process to fail.

Unfortunately, that's actually far more common that many people realize. I've seen many problems that were initially blamed on Windows but turned out to be bad hardware. And I've seen disk transfer issues that were caused by bad interface cards or bugs in the computer's BIOS. But when you have good quality hardware these processes work properly and reliably.

Knowing this, I've always bought top quality hardware for myself. I'm a computer programmer so I depend on my computers for my livelihood. In years of doing this I've never produced a coaster in my CD burner, and I've never had a problem reading a USB device.

I would recommend replacing any device that didn’t signal a transfer failure when one occurred. The device is faulty.For the record, I'm also a computer professional, with years of hardware experience, having been working with PCs since the beginning.
OP is transferring directly from the camera to the computer. So it's effectively going over a network, not a local hard drive. Plenty of room for corruption there. There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence here of people discovering their card readers or cables were bad only when they saw the corupted pictures on the PC, while still having the good ones on the camera.

I've been dealing with computers long enough to know that you don't delete the original until you've got several backups because sooner or later you'll get bit. My files stay on the card after I've transferreed them to the initial computer, where they're indexed. They're then transferred to the principal computer, where they reside on two separate external drives, one ordered by camera and flolder and the other by subject. They're then backed up to two DVDs, with overlap between sessions, so each file is on at least 4 in total. They're also backed up to two more external drives. Only then will I consider deleting the original card files and the files from the initial computer, but not until I need the additional space. Deleting before you've made any backup is begging for trouble.

[Graystar]

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[Jon]

No - but you've got the computer in the camera talking to the computer in the computer, not the computer reading directly from the card. USB is strictly a wrapper around whatever other protocols are being used. You don't want a detailed step-by-step description of my backup process; the point is that I don't delete anything until it's verified, which was the point you seemed to have difficulty with initially. Directly transferring from the camera isn't remotely like transferring via card reader at the low level; both can go wrong but a card reader transfer is much more reliably verifiable.

[RadAL]

EASIEST way is to just plug the USB wire into the camera, turn it on (might have to go to recycle mode...) and open right click start, go to explorer (if you have XP), your camera should have popped up in its own window, click that all the pics are there and you just simply move them, and repeat the process if you want to do more than one memory card.