Want to select photos from digital camera to upload

Question

Hi,
I like keeping a number of pictures on my camera instead of erasing them everytime I transfer them on to my computer. As a result, it takes forever for iPhoto to go through the 700 pictures on my camera to pick up the 2 new ones that I want to put on the computer. (Selecting 'do not import duplicates' does not speed the process.) Is there a way I can do this more quickly? On other computers, you can just click on the camera icon and select the new photos, and upload those. Any tips or suggestions?
Thanks!

Answer 1

iPhoto doesn't provide enough control of the import process to select individual photos. You can use another application called Image Capture that comes with MacOS X. Image capture will only capture to the hard drive so you'll have to separately import the photos into iPhoto and then delete them (if you want) because iPhoto will copy them into the library.
With your camera or memory card connected, open Image Capture. If iPhoto automatically starts and asks if you want to import, just ignore it. You can quit iPhoto for now or Hide it if you want. Bring Image Capture to the front. There should be a window with the name of your device (camera or memory reader) in the title bar.
The first popup menu is Download To: Note what it says or click it and choose Other... to download to another folder.
Click the "Download Some..." button and you'll see a preview window with thumbnails of what's on your camera/memory card. Select the ones you want. Then click Download. The selected photos will download to the hard drive.
Import the new photos into iPhoto either using iPhoto's Import menu command or drag and drop them from the Finder onto iPhoto's main window. After iPhoto imports them, you can delete the ones from the Finder.
BTW, you can set your Mac to automatically open Image Capture instead of iPhoto when you connect your Camera/memory card. This must be done in Image Capture's Preferences. Open Preferences and in the General tab select which application you want in the first popup menu.
Another way that's shorter if your camera mounts as a disk drive when you connect it is to find the photos you want directly from the camera's memory in the resulting Finder window and drag and drop directly into iPhoto's main window. After they import, eject your camera's disk icon before disconnecting it. You may need to switch the Finder view to column in order to see a thumbnail of each photo unless you know by the file names which ones you want.
PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   FW800, 4 internal HD - 550GB