Hope you had a great Fourth of July weekend! Did you take a lot of pictures? If you don’t have a digital camera or scanner, how do you get your photos “digitized” to email them to family and friends, or to archive on your computer’s hard drive or CD? Here’s one way – take your rolls of film to Wal-Mart for developing, and they’ll put them on a CD for you.

Now, there are surely other local developers that offer this kind of service, and I am not “endorsing” Wal-Mart, but I have used their service and it works well. When you take your film in to be developed, just note on the envelope that you want a Photo CD. When you get your pictures back you have the usual prints plus a CD that contains both thumbnails and large, high-resolution digital versions of your pictures. The service costs an additional $3.84 if you get the CD when you get the film developed. You can take your negatives in later to get a Photo CD, but it’s more expensive to do it that way.

Also included on the CD is some Windows software to run to view the photos. With your Mac, you obviously don’t need that – that’s what iPhoto is for. Simply open iPhoto and drag the folder with the large photos into either the main window (iPhoto will put them in your Photo Library) or into the sidebar on the left (where iPhoto will create an Album as well as put them in the Photo Library). From there you can do all the good iPhoto stuff.

If you don’t use iPhoto, or you just want to get the pictures onto the computer to deal with later, just drag the folder onto your hard drive, wait till it copies, then file the CD away somewhere. If you’re using Mac OS X, and you just want to quickly peruse your masterpieces, open the folder (either the one on the CD or the one you’ve copied), select all the images in the folder, and drag them down to the Preview icon on the dock. The Preview application will open with a scrollable list of thumbnails of all the photos. Note that you can’t just drop the photo folder on the Preview icon – you have to open the folder and drag the photos themselves.

Keep those emails coming to petez@macmaineiac.com, and, as always, Semper Mac! Take care.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski