Samantha writes in with a hardware question
Q. How do you transfer pictures from a digital camera to a computer using a USB cable?
A. The method of transferring pictures from your camera to computer will vary depending on the camera. In most cases it’s pretty straight forward. Simply plug the camera into any open USB port. If you have some on the front then that's usually easier.
Turn the camera on and put it to play or view mode rather than take picture mode. You may get a popup on your computer screen that says it found a camera and what do you want to do with some choices (see choices attachment). Most of the time none of the choices are too helpful. Once the camera is recognized you can open My Computer and see if it’s listed there as a drive or device. If so then you can double click it and browse through a couple of folders to find your pictures. Then you can highlight and copy and paste them into a folder on your computer.
You can also make a shortcut to your camera on your desktop by right clicking the camera icon in My Computer and selecting Create Shortcut. It will say it can’t make one there and ask if you want a shortcut on your desktop. Chose yes to make one.
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