Acquiring Photos and Videos from a Digital Camera or Removable Device
From Phanfare Support
The Windows version of the Phanfare application lets you create albums automatically by downloading photos and videos directly from your digital camera, memory card reader, USB memory key or any other removable storage device.
(The Mac version of Phanfare will support direct download to Phanfare soon.)
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The Acquire Wizard
To get started, plug your camera or storage device into your PC and, if necessary, turn it on. Windows should automatically recognize the newly attached device and one of the following dialog boxes will pop up.
Select the Phanfare option and click OK. The Phanfare Acquire Wizard will launch.
The Acquire Wizard presents you with a variety of options:
Account Selection: The wizard defaults to importing images and videos into the most recently used Phanfare account on the PC. However, if you have multiple accounts, you can import to one of the other ones instead by selecting it from the drop down list or typing its name into Account Selection field.
Album Options: You can choose to import all of the photos and videos into a single Phanfare album, or you can have Phanfare create a different album for each day's files on the card. This is useful if you don't download files from the card very frequently and you have photos and videos from several events on the card. Each folder's name will be the eight digit mm/dd/yyyy date on which photos and videos were taken.
Import Options - Local Folder: In addition to sending the images and videos to Phanfare, the Acquire Wizard also stores a copy on your hard drive. If you've chosen to import everything into a single Phanfare album, we'll store the files in a folder with the same name beneath your My Pictures folder. For instance, if you imported all of your files into an album called Hawaii, then they'll also be stored in My Documents\My Pictures\Hawaii.
If you've chosen to import into albums by date, the corresponding local folders will be named in year-month-day format.
Import Options – Delete: Checking this option will delete your photos and videos from the camera or memory card after they've been sent to the Phanfare application and copied to your hard drive.
Additional Notes:
- The Acquire Wizard only looks down two levels of folders on your camera or removable storage device. So we'll retrieve images stored in \DCIM\100CASIO or \2007\Winter, but not in \2007\Winter\Skiing.
- If you choose to create a different folder for each day's photos and videos, and a folder already exists that's named with that day's date, the Acquire Wizard will create a second Phanfare album with that date, and create a local folder with an underscore and an incremented digit appended to the end, such as 2007-12-31_1.
- If you've chosen to import photos and videos into an account which is not the active Phanfare user's account, the files will be stored in a staging area and will be uploaded the next time you sign in using that account.
Changing Windows' Default Program for Acquiring Photos and Videos
If a program other than Phanfare launches every time you connect your camera, but you'd rather have Phanfare be the default program, go to My Computer and right-click on the camera. Select Properties. Click on the Events tab and select the radio button next to Start this program. Choose Phanfare Acquire Wizard from the drop-down menu click OK.
Acquiring Photos and Videos from within the Phanfare desktop application
If your camera or memory card is already connected to your computer, you can acquire photos and videos by selecting Import from the File menu.
- Some cameras identify themselves to the computer as Windows Image Acquisition devices. These cameras names will appear in the Import menu. Select the camera and the Phanfare Acquire Wizard will launch. (See above.)
- Other cameras identify themselves as Removable Mass Storage devices and show up as new disk drives on your PC. For these, select Folder from the Import menu and navigate to the appropriate drive letter.
