Import Photo AND Video from SDCard - separate programs

[WambleJ]

I am a new Mac user after years of pc use. One simple task that I don't know if the Mac can do is the following.
When I put in an sdcard from my camera I would like it to put photos in one place (or program) and videos in another. I can do this on my pc but on camera import settings on Mac I don't see a way to do this. If someone can help that'd be great. Thanks!

 

[r0k]

I am a new Mac user after years of pc use. One simple task that I don't know if the Mac can do is the following.
When I put in an sdcard from my camera I would like it to put photos in one place (or program) and videos in another. I can do this on my pc but on camera import settings on Mac I don't see a way to do this. If someone can help that'd be great. Thanks!

I use Image Capture. It can import photos and videos as files to your disk. But wait! You might be asking "what about iPhoto and iMovie?"

Those are fine programs but I don't rely on iPhoto Library to store my originals of anything. Even with photostream, I drag my originals out of the auto-created "august photostream" album to a folder I can back up and then I re-import them, not allowing the files to be copied to iPhoto Library.

I allowed my iPhoto Library to grow to about 67 gigabytes and it got so slow it was unusable. I now have iPhoto organizing about 240 gig of photos but my iPhoto Library is under 12 gig.

I was creating folders by day. This is what eye-fi cards can do so I kept up the habit for a while. Now I just create one folder for each month.

I would suggest you back up your photos someplace like Picasa, Flickr or even a paid service like Smugmug. I like to use Smugmug because they don't have any storage limits or photo size limits, though they do limit video clips to only a few seconds.

If you're looking for Image capture, first go in iPhoto preferences and shut off launching any app when you insert an SD card or connect a camera. You can use Spotlight and type "ima" and that's enough characters for OSX to highlight Image Capture. I suppose you could have image capture launch automatically but I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing. I'd rather type 3 characters every time than have to think about whether to plug in an sd card for fear the wrong program might launch.

hope this helps...

 

[WambleJ]

I'm not so concerned about whether or not to use those programs. What I would like is for my Mac to pull the pictures into iPhoto and the videos into iMovie off the same sd card. It doesn't seem to have this capability. It puts them all in iPhoto and I can export as needed.

 

[Dave Braine]

iMovie is not the same type of app as iPhoto. iPhoto is for storing and cataloguing your photos. It will also import the videos from your camera.

iMovie is for taking that video footage, editing it, adding some effects, titles etc and then Sharing or Exporting the finished movie. It's not designed for storing and cataloguing.

In iPhoto, I put all my camera video footage into one Album, which makes it easier to find them. iMovie will "see" all of your iPhoto video footage, so you can edit without having to export them from iPhoto.