Copying pictures back to your digital camera

The first time I heard of someone wanting to copy pictures from their computer to their digital camera, it was because a neighbors son had helped his mother copy pictures to her computer and then assumed that she no longer needed them on the camera. He very helpfully deleted all of them.

Mom was quite upset when she found her camera empty. Yes, she did want the pictures on her computer and she was happy to have them, but she also liked showing off her grandchildren from the camera when she was out and about.

Her son had already left, so she called me. I had some answers for her, though they were not necessarily the answers she wanted. I told here that it was possible that the process could be easily reversed: reattach the camera or memory card and just copy the pictures back (making certain to really COPY and not just create shortcuts).

That might just work.

Unfortunately, it's not always that easy. It just might not work, too.

Some cameras are fussy

Some cameras are easy going types. You could copy any old picture to them and they would happily keep it and be ready to show it in their viewfinder whenever you like.

It's kind of like people and food. You can serve some people Brussel sprouts and they'll gobble them up like candy. Other people may turn pale or eat them but harbor a deep resentment of you and your cooking from that day forward. Cameras can be fussy like that.

File Names

It can just be a matter of names. I have a digital camera here that doesn't mind Brussel sprouts - well, pictures of Brussel sprouts that it didn't take - just so long as you don't call them "BrusselSprouts.jpg" or whatever. If I name them something like "DSC01133.JPG", it's happy. 

That's not what I'd call an excessively fussy camera. It has its little thing about proper names, but that's not so terribly unreasonable, is it?

Resolution and ratios

I haven't had any personal experience with this, but it seems reasonable to assume that your camera might be fussy about file sizes, resolutions and dimensions, too. If you have a picture that is not sized as the camera itself could have produced, you might need to use editing software to get it where you want it.

Neither this nor the file name issue would be a problem for my neighbor, of course.

Secret Stuff

I had correspondence with someone else who apparently has a camera that is a bit more snippety. Like my camera, it always used a specific naming format, but unlike mine, simply copying something to an appropriate name didn't work.

I took a guess that the camera maintained some sort of index file that we couldn't see and suggested snapping some "junk" pictures and overwriting those with the pictures he actually wanted.

He did that, and found that it worked. He then snapped 160 "blue sky photos" (to make it easy to recognize those that he could overwrite), and then copied the photos he really wanted back on top of those. It took him hours, he said, which was unfortunate, because I could have helped him write a script to automate the necessary renaming and copying, but at least he got it done.

Exif data

One thing that can be different about pictures from a camera and pictures from other sources can be the presence of Exif tags. This is just metadata added to the picture. It's not anything you normally see, but it's there just the same.

On Mac OS X, you can see that in the "More Info" section after selecting a file and clicking "More Info".

Windows XP can show you that if you right click and choose "Properties", but apparently that runs some risk of corrupting the photo (Microsoft has such clever programmers!). It's probably a better idea to download one of the many free Exif viewers you can find.

But what if your picture - the very one that you want on your camera - does NOT contain Exif data? Your camera may righteously reject this as unacceptable no matter what else you have done to convince it that it should take this and store it for you.

Yes, that is an unreasonable attitude, I agree. But apparently many cameras have this basic unwillingness to have what they must consider to be foreign objects inserted into their memory cards. You can certainly go ahead and force the issue, but the camera may decide not to play the game with you.

All may not be lost. There are tools that will let you add Exif data to pictures. I found one called "ExifTool by Phil Harvey" that is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux). I haven't personally tried adding appropriate data, but I suspect that it would work. However, that may be completely unnecessary: this post says that all that is needed is the tag that says the picture contains Exif data - it doesn't really need any of the usual tags. That seems quite logical to me and may also seem so to your camera.

Let's hope you don't need this

More can happen to your pictures than an overly helpful son. Memory cards can and do go bad. It may also happen that you have a 1GB card in your camera and decide that upgrading to a larger capacity will be helpful. You might well want to transfer the pictures from the old card to the new in that circumstance.

If so, I hope that's straightforward and easy. If not, I hope that one of the suggestions above lets you get what you want.

Do you know someone who should be reading this? Click the Share button below to send it to them easily or to post it to Facebook or Twitter.