How to Transfer Photos From Your Camera To Your Mac

It's an application that lives on your Mac. It's been there forever. Apple doesn't promote it. Most typical Mac users I know, support, and teach have never heard of it. Yet, it's incredibly useful.

Image Capture is a simple but powerful application that lets you transfer images, video clips and MP3 sounds to your Mac from digital cameras and camera-enabled iOS devices. It's home is the Mac's Applications folder.

Why would you use Image Capture over iPhoto for transferring image files from your devices? First of all, not everyone uses iPhoto. Hard to believe, but true. Many advanced amateur and professional photographers (for example, RAW format shooters) prefer the power of more flexible and feature-rich photo-management and editing applications like Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Pixelmator and others.

Whether you fall into either the casual or the more advanced camera-toting Mac user camp, Image Capture is an Application you should become familiar with. There are those times when you want to do a quick-and-easy import of photos from your device, completely bypassing the automatic import features of iPhoto and other applications.