Section 14.11. Image Capture

14.11. Image Capture

This unsung little program is something of an orphan. It was designed to download pictures from a USB digital camera and then process them automatically (turning them into a Web page, scaling them to emailable size , and so on). Of course, since Image Capture's birth, iPhoto came along, generally blowing its predecessor out of the water. Even so, Apple still includes Image Capture with Mac OS X for these reasons:

• Image Capture makes it easy to download only some pictures from your camera. iPhoto, by contrast, always downloads the entire contents of your camera's memory card. (Figure 14-14 shows how to choose individual pictures.)

• Image Capture can grab images from Mac OS Xcompatible scanners , too, not just digital cameras .

• Image Capture can turn a compatible digital camera into a Webcam, broadcasting whatever it "sees" to anyone on your office networkor the whole Internet. Similarly, it can share a scanner with all the networked Macs in your office.

Once Image Capture is open , it looks like Figure 14-14.

Figure 14-14. Top: You can set up Image Capture to open automatically when you attach a USB camera to your Mac. One click (on Download All) transfers its pictures to your hard drive.
Bottom: If you click Download Some, you get this "slide-sorter" window, where you can choose the individual pictures you want to download, use the buttons at the top to rotate selected shots, or delete shots from the camera. In slide-sorter view, Shift-click or -click the thumbnails of the pictures you want. In list view, Shift-click or -click as though they're Finder list-view files.

Here, you can use the pop-up menus to specify a destination folder for downloaded pictures and specify what happens automatically after they arrive ("Build slide show" or "Build Web page," for example).