Overview

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Downloader is a powerful utility for transferring your digital images quickly and safely from your camera or card reader to your PC. It can be used to download JPEG and TIFF images from all digital cameras and raw files from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, Minolta, Pentax and Sony cameras.

Automatic folder naming

Use the folder renaming option to automatically organize your images as you download them:

In the example above the source images are in three separate folders on the memory card and are downloaded to a single folder named with the date the pictures were taken and the subject. The subject can be entered using the "Job code" which can be setup to prompt you every time downloader is run:

For this example the download directory was set to "C:\Photos\%Y-%m-%D %J". %Y-%m-%D expands to the year, month and day the photo was taken and %J expands to whatever was entered for the job code. See Download Preferences for details.

Automatic file naming

Downloader can also automatically rename the images from the short eight character names written by the camera to something more meaningful. In the example below the filenames were specified as "%Y-%m-%D %J %H%M%S" to give the date the photo was taken followed by the subject (the job code entered above) and the time the photo was taken:

See Download Preferences for details.

Automatic JPEG rotation

More and more digital cameras have an orientation sensor which detects whether a shot is taken in vertical or horizontal format. The camera stores this information in the EXIF shooting data but unfortunately most applications ignore this data and won't display the image correctly rotated. Downloader can automatically rotate these images without any loss of quality so that they are correctly displayed on your PC. See General Preferences for details.

Automatic NAA/IPTC data entry

NAA/IPTC data is a method of storing textual information in images such as location, keywords, copyright information and captions. Downloader can automatically add this information to images as they are downloaded. This is a big time saver for professional photographers who need to enter IPTC data before submitting images to newspapers and magazines but is also useful to other photographers who wish to record location and other information in their images. See the NAA/IPTC page for details.

Plug-ins to extend Downloader's functionality

Downloader has a plug-in interface which allows additional operations to be applied to images as they are downloaded. Downloader ships with three plug-ins:

JPEG auto profile - automatically embeds a color profile in JPEGs according to the camera model
JPEG resolution - automatically sets the resolution to a user defined DPI or dots/cm value making it easier to set the print size in applications like Adobe Photoshop
Directory Maker - creates empty directories to support your workflow e.g. in addition to the download directory this plug-in can create directories called working, finished, edited, web etc.

See the Plug-ins page for details.

Support for external storage devices

Downloader supports the downloading of images from external storage devices such as the NixVue Vista and Delkin PicturePad. It automatically scans the disk to detect duplicate files and will only download one copy of each file. Downloader also has display options to hide files that have already been downloaded and duplicates to make it easier to see the files that need downloading.

Canon EOS 300D/Digital Rebel FEC

Downloader Pro can be used to adjust the flash exposure compensation (FEC) setting on the Canon EOS 300D/Digital Rebel. This setting is not available using the normal camera controls, but can be set by connecting the camera to a PC using a USB cable and running Downloader Pro. Please see the section on the camera settings dialog for more details