Mac Forum / General / General / July 2006

You'd have to have the camera play a hard drive.

I think you can set it either to P2P or Mass storage - as far as I
remember both work with my Nikon.

And prevent Mac OS X from opening iPhoto (unless you want to have iPhoto
copy the photos to your Mac).

From iPhoto Help:
iPhoto works with Image Capture, an application included with Mac OS X,
to transfer pictures from your digital camera to your photo library.
When you open iPhoto for the first time, you're asked if you want iPhoto
to open each time you connect a camera to your computer. You can also
choose a different application.
To choose the application that opens:
  1. Make sure no cameras are connected to your computer.
  2. Open Image Capture (in your Applications folder).
  3. Choose Image Capture > Preferences.
  4. Click General at the top of the Preferences window and choose an
application from the pop-up menu.

HTH

Marc

If OS X is not seeing the usb device, perhaps try a Mac driver for that
camera.  Or just use a card reader.  Most people find them cheap and
more convenient.  Are you trying to use the computer to control the
camera?  If so, you need remote control software for OS X and your
camera.

Canon cameras can't be treated as external drives.  For some
reason Canon doesn't want to support USB mass storage.  (There
are other cameras brands that take this approach as well).

Canon has its own protocol (usually called 'Normal' in the camera
menu under 'Communications') most newer cameras also have the widely
supported PTP protocol. (Picture Transfer Protocol).

It appears OSX supports PTP  (sorry for the long URL.. depending on
your reader, you might have to fix the line wrap).

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=OSCompatibilityAct&fcategoryid=
139&modelid=11154&keycode=macdr

The best way by far is to pick up a USB card reader.  You can
plug these into any modern computer.  They only cost about 15
bucks for a basic one.  You pay a bit more for USB2 but not
that much.

Speaking as a long time Canon digital camera owner who uses Mac OS X,
save yourself a lot of trouble and buy a card reader. 'Nuf said.

You should have Image Capture application in your Applications folder.  
Set the camera setting to no applications in the preferences.

Why do you want to drag the photos onto your hard drive manually?  Why
not use the software Canon provides?

I bought a Canon PowerShot S-80 in February; it came with a Canon
Utilities package that is completely adequate for anything I have
needed to do so far, and seems more convenient (and less baffling) than
iPhoto.  It works well with Mac OS X 10.4.6 on my iMac G5 (iSight) and
hasn't given me any problems at all.

In particular, Canon's ImageBrowser (version 5.5.0.21) is convenient
for organizing the photos on a hard drive.  By default it places the
image files taken on a given day in a folder with the date as the
folder name, but you can change the name -- say, add a brief
description -- if you choose to.  The folders and the image files can
be moved, copied, renamed, or deleted at will, either with ImageBrowser
itself or with the Finder -- unlike iPhoto which always seems to have a
mind of its own as to where your image files should be stored.  For any
photo, ImageBrowser shows complete information on the camera settings
(26 items for the S-80) as well as the brightness histogram.  It also
allows you to examine the photo at full resolution and compare up to
four images side by side.  It can be used to print a photo in your
choice of size, orientation, and with or without the exposure date (in
any color you choose).

Transferring from camera to hard drive is automatic when you plug the
USB cable into the camera.  The computer loads a program called Camera
Window that allows you to upload all your photos or only the new ones,
as you choose.  If you have a card reader, the same program will upload
from the memory card equally well.  Again, why struggle to transfer
your photos to your hard drive when this free program does it for you
intelligently and easily?

I used to own a Sony S70 and transferred pictures using the USB but the
cable became faulty after a year or two so I was forced to get a small
card reader. This simply becomes an icon on the desktop under OSX.
While it's very easy, you'll have to sort and label the pictures
yourself, but it does allow you to create a folder to dump unedited
pictures for backup to CDR or DVD.