Importing Photos from a Camera or Card Reader Into Photoshop Elements 2019

Watch Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial below. Learn about importing images from a camera, phone and card reader. Also, we will discuss the download options and autoplay settings that you can modify. We will also look at the available photo downloader advanced options.

Welcome back to our course on PSE 2019. I said earlier on in the course that I would return to the subject of getting images from cameras, card readers and so on. This chapter is devoted to various ways of getting images into PSE.

If you know how to do this with all of the sources of images for you; you can certainly skip this section. I should point out that there are so many cameras, phones, and other devices that can be used to capture images that I can’t cover all of them on a course like this one. So, I’ve tried to concentrate on a few of the most popular devices and on the more general aspects of capture.

In this first section, I’m going to once again capture images from a camera. But I’m going to show you how you can automate the process. In fact, effectively I’m going to show you two levels of automation of capturing images from a camera. Now, when I say camera, of course, this can mean a camera on a smartphone.

Since this first section is primarily about automating the capture process in some of the most common situations. I want to talk first a little about cameras, phones, and cards in relation to Windows. Then, we’re going to look again at the Photo Downloader. We’ll set up and I’ll demonstrate an automatic download. We’ll look at some advanced options in the Photo Downloader.

The first thing to do is to just demonstrate a few things to you in Windows that are important to recognize or understand. If you’re going to automatically download photos, then you’re going to need to set up a couple of Window settings. That’s really why I’m doing this demonstration.

So for the purposes of this, I’m going to close down the Organizer. What I have is an SD card from a small compact camera. And, what I’m going to do is to put that SD card into the slot on my PC. Watch what happens.

Now, what happens is a little message comes up: USB Drive (F:) Select what happens with memory cards. If I clicked on that message, I could have selected what happens with memory cards. I’m going to do that in a few minutes from now but I wanted to demonstrate that first.

What I’m going to do next is to attach an iPhone to my device. So, I’m going to attach this using a cable. I just need to slot the PC end of the cable into the USB port on my device and watch what happens.

The difference here is that when I plug the iPhone in, it immediately goes into File Explorer. So, I can now open up the internal storage area on the iPhone. Look at any photos on there and so on. Normally, of course, I’ll need to allow this at the iPhone end. But I have used this iPhone with this PC before. So this set up was done some time ago.

And so the devices, I’m plugging in are behaving in different ways. One is asking me what to do and the other one already knows what it wants me to do. There are some Windows settings that I’m going to come back to a little bit later on in this section. I’m going to explain why they behave differently and how to change how they behave.

So, I’m back in the Organizer. I’m going to return to the way that we captured some images before using the From Camera or Card Reader option. On this occasion, I’ve put that SD card back in from the compact camera rather than having the phone attached. So, if I click on the Select a Device option, I’m offered F:\<Camera or Card Reader>.

As before, when it comes to capturing from a card it has a look at the card. It counts the number of images. And then, I have the various options for getting those media into my PC.

I have two options in terms of automating this process. One option is to set up my device so that when I plug that card in, it automatically starts up the Organizer and automatically starts up the Photo Downloader.

It basically pretty much totally automates the process of getting to this point. The second option takes this automation to another level altogether. But we’ll come back to that a little bit later on in this section. For the moment, I need to exit the Organizer and return to Windows.

The basic thing that I need to do is to tell Windows that when I put that SD card in, it needs to run the Elements Organizer for me. You can either do it using that little popup box that we saw before. But in Windows 10 there are two places that you can set AutoPlay settings.

You can either do it from the Control Panel or there are specifically AutoPlay settings. I’m just going to type in here: AutoPlay Settings on Windows 10. It’s the equivalent in earlier versions of Windows and then you are presented with these default settings.

If you look at the last option here, I have two Apple iPhone entries. But normally, you’d only see one for one iPhone, etcetera. If you look at the very bottom setting for Apple iPhone, when I plug the iPhone in, what it does is to open the device to view files: File Explorer.

I demonstrated to you earlier in this section that when I plug the iPhone in, that’s what happens. It runs File Explorer. But if you look at the things I could tell it to do they include going into the Organizer. Organize and edit Adobe Elements Organizer. I’m going to stick with that.

If I go up to Memory Card, what I want that to do is not to open File Explorer. But I want it to run Adobe Elements Organizer. Depending on what options you have on your device, you may be tempted to go for Organize and edit Adobe Elements 2018 Organizer.

But of course, this is 2019. In fact, on my device, the very top entry, hidden actually, Organize and edit Adobe Elements 17 Organizer. Now, Adobe Elements 17 is the sort of the hidden name of Adobe Elements 2019, believe it or not.

This installation I have to choose that option, Organize and edit Adobe Elements 17 Organizer. That actually means PSE 2019.

So, having set that up, I’d just like you to check one other thing. Make sure that you have AutoPlay switched on. This button up at the top here, AutoPlay, Use AutoPlay for all media and devices, make sure that is on.

I’ve closed down the Windows 10 Setting panel and we can try this out.

Now what should happen is that when I put that card in Windows 10 will say; “Oh, I’m supposed to start Element Organizer”. And it will start Elements Organizer. What Elements Organizer will do will be its default action to take when control is passed to it from Windows 10. You’re going to see what that is in just a moment.

Let me just put that card in again. The Photo Downloader dialog opens and the Organizer starts counting and checking the media on the card and it tells me there are 1,079 files selected, 4.7 gigabytes.

All I need to do is click on Get Media to get that just over 1,000 images. So, that is pretty much automated most of the process. As I said we would. We’ve got to that point, click on Get Media and away you go.

But what we’re going to do now is to automate it to the next level, to the level where you don’t even have to click on Get Media. Let me cancel this, let me go back into the Organizer.

So, we go into the Preferences and in particular, we need the Camera or Card Reader. The lower section there, Download Options, is the one that we need to work on. By default, there is a definition of the action to take if a generic device is detected on the system.

Now, for our purposes that means that if the Organizer needs to download images from a device this is what to do. Now, since we’re only dealing with this one device here at the moment, the card.

I’m just going to modify the generic device action. It currently says Show APD. That’s the Photo Downloader dialog standard. If I select that and edit it, I have alternative things to do.

One of them, the lower one, is to show the Advanced dialog. The other one is to do an automatic download and that’s what I want to do. Instead of showing that dialog, I’m going to do an automatic download.

Having specified automatic download, I can then select from these options, change if necessary. Begin download immediately, no dialog displayed. Well, that’s one option. But I’m going to say After a delay of 10 seconds.

So, I’m going to give myself 10 seconds to just quickly check that what’s happening is what I want to happen. I get 10 seconds to cancel it before it goes. You’ll see that in a moment.

The images that are downloaded automatically are going into subfolders. What names would you like to use for those subfolders?

Well, I’m going to use the default shot date names. And then, we’ve already discussed these delete options. I’m going to leave those as they are. Click on OK.

Now, what I’m going to do is close the Organizer again. I’m going to put the card in again and we’ll see what happens. Then away it goes.

Now, note the 10 second delay there where I can change my mind, do a Cancel. I’ve not cancelled so away it goes.

That is the automated, the fully automated process, which I know some people really like to do. They like to be able to sort of put their memory card in at the end of the day. Go and make a cup of coffee or something, come back all of the images are there. Now, this does take quite a while to run. So, I’ll come back to it in a minute.

Then, the Organizer is started up. We get this message about these new files. New files have been downloaded from a device since the last launch of Elements Organizer.

Elements Organizer will now import these files into the catalog. When finished do you want to show only the new files in media browser? Yes, I do for reasons that will become apparent in a moment.

Now, they’ve gone into the catalog. This also will take a little while. Note that in most stages of this process you can see a Stop button there. Just in case, you do decide to stop the process.

The Organizer has of course stored each of the images in its appropriate subfolder. There’s over 1,000 images. They’re quite high resolution so it takes a while for this to happen. But as you can see it’s all pretty highly automated.

This is to do with watched folders. I’m going to talk about watched folders later on in the course. For the moment, don’t need to worry about that. There is our last import batch. Note, the count in the bottom left hand corner, 1,079 items. That’s a pretty much fully automated download.

Now, what I’m going to do now is to delete all of those images again. Because I want to selectively download some of them to demonstrate the advanced dialog.

To select all of the displayed images, you can use keyboard shortcut Control-A or Edit, Select All, press the Delete key, also delete from the hard disk. It’s going to take a while to delete all of those. So, you’ll join me again in a moment.

They’ve all gone. Let’s go back to the Get Photos and Videos from Camera or Card Reader, select the device. Let’s go into the Advanced dialog. There are a couple of really big advantages with the advanced dialog.

One of them is that you can use this gallery on the left to select which images you want to download. Now by default, they’re all checked so they’re all going to be downloaded. I can uncheck them all. Then, just check the ones that I want to download.

There are about eight images there that I want to download. They are images of a particular type of butterfly, a Comma butterfly, and I just want to download those. I just check those and now let’s look at the Save options.

Many of them correspond to ones we’ve seen before and many of them are options. We’re going to come back to later on but there are a couple that I want to set.

If you look at Rename Files, if I want to rename the files; I can rename them to a custom name. The custom name, I’m going to use is (Comma). Now, what will happen is that they will be given names like Comma_0001.JPEG and Comma_0002.JPEG and so on.

But I am going to check this box that says Preserve current file name in the metadata for the image. Another option, I’m going to apply here is down here, Creator.

I’m going to put my own name in here. I could, for instance, also add a copyright statement there. Now, there are quite a few other things that you can do but let’s just go with that for the moment, click on Get Media. There they are.

If I select one of those images and look at its file information, you’ll see that its file name is Comma_0006. If I look in the metadata, you can see the preserved file name there. And what’s shown as the artist here. That’s my name.

So that’s the use of the advanced dialog and the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Adam Lacey

Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats. When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.