Downloading Pictures from your Digital Camera

I was looking for an easy way to get the photos off of our digital camera since doing it the manual way was too time consuming and confusing. So, I wrote a small batch script, and you can download it if you have any use for it. See the full text for additional details.

What is a batch script?
A “batch” script is an executable file that runs like a program or like a macro.

What the script does
The script will look at your destination folder, and create a new folder for today, in the format of YYYYMMDD. So, all of the photos on your camera, regardless of the date taken, are saved to your computer in a folder representing the date of the import (analogous to when you’d process a roll of film on one day, back when you had a film camera). So, if I ran the import script on December 26, 2008, it would create a new folder called 20081226, and then move all pictures from your camera to the new folder.  Please note that the picture files are “moved” and not “copied”, which means that the original photos are deleted from your camera. If that makes you nervous, this script isn’t for you. Also, it stores all of the photos from a year in a top level year folder in the format of YYYY. So, it will create a 2008 folder, and within it, save the pictures to the 20081226 subfolder.

How to use the script
Before you run the script, you need to open it in order to tell it which folders to use. So, right click the batch file and select Edit. You’ll have the script open, and you see two lines you need to edit. The first line you’ll need to modify is the one that says “SET DR=C:\test\Originals\” Simply change this to the path representing the folder on your computer that you want to save the photos to. Be sure you don’t include a space after the equals sign =. Also, be sure to include the trailing slash \. The next line you need to change says “SET SOURCEROOT=C:\test\Camera\”. You need to change that to the folder that your camera uses as its folder for the photos. If you don’t know what that is, simply plug in your digital camera, and the use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder.

Once your paths are right, to run the script simply double click it! You should test the script to ensure it works for you, and please use it at your own risk, there are no warranties.

The batch file is delivered inside a zip file, so extract the getpix.bat file from the getpix.zip and you are good to go.