OS 9 software for digital camera?

Hi, Limnos. There is no need to use Canon software to extract photos from your camera. Just buy a $10-$20 card reader, remove the CF card from the camera and put it into the reader, and the card will appear as a disk on your dedktop. Drag-copy the photos to your HD the same way you'd copy them from any other source. This also saves on camera batteries, since they aren't used to power the transfer.

Brian: The cost of any application that will, in OS 9, reliably interface with and import your pictures from any camera you might ultimately choose to buy is very likely to exceed the cost of a 6-in-1 or 12-in-1 card reader — and a card reader is far more likely than any application to work with every brand of card and camera, in every Mac OS version that supports USB 1.1 or better. BTW, I notice that Canon stipulates that its own OS 9 software for the A80 (the software you didn't get) requires a factory-installed USB port. They're probably just covering themselves with that requirement, but it might be real.

A card reader would be a hassle-free bargain. If no one can come up with a software suggestion for you, the process of identifying a suitable app by yourself will be anything but hassle-free — and isn't likely to be much of a bargain, either.

Brian.

Do you have a USB port on the computer in question?

If so, plug it in and see if the camera's memory card appears on the desktop as a drive icon. I have a Sony CyberShot digital camera and the memory sticks are formatted to the MS-DOS file system that Mac OS can read, and the camera itself should have a USB output setup for either PTP, PictBridge or the plain old 'normal' outputs.

9 times out of 10, when the camera makers recommend a minimum OS for connectivity, they also mean it to work with some sort of image viewer application that comes with the camera. It has nothing to do with the memory stick or some esoteric format. To be sure, take a look at the camera setup and poke around, somewhere it should have listed the format of the card.

If you have a secondary image manipulation application like Adobe PhotoDeluxe, what you do is just open the camera 'drive' icon on the desktop and root through the folders until you find the images and drag and drop them onto a new folder on your hard drive. Unless the camera is some super-duper SLR taking RAW format pictures, they will be jpegs or maybe .tiffs. You can use any third party image processing application to manipulate the pictures then. If you want to preview the images and delete the ones you don't like, the QuickTime 6 PictureViewer works just dandy.

To empty the memory card after you get the images you want, simply highlight the picture files and move them to the trash end empty it. Works like a charm.

I have done the same with a Canon Rebel XT digital SLR and went so far as to put USB drivers from OS9 into an ancient 8100 PowerMac running OS 8.6 and it worked perfectly!

Deb.

Brian and Deborah: When a camera comes with a USB cable to connect it to a computer, the software that also comes with it is usually necessary to make the card inside the camera appear as a "disk" on the desktop — if that happens at all. There may be some cameras that are sufficiently "transparent" to the OS so that cards inside them will appear on the desktop without installing any software — but of the seven or eight different cameras I've used from time to time, none fit that description: all the ones I've used required the installation of proprietary software (provided by the camera's manufacturer) to enable a direct USB connection of camera to computer. In some cases the card inside the camera shows up on the desktop, but in others the photos can only be imported onto the computer from within the manufacturer's proprietary image-browsing application. (After that they can be moved, copied, and edited using other apps.)

The manufacturer's software typically has two parts: (a) an image browser application that often has some editing capabilities, and (b) a USB "shim" or other behind-the-scenes supplement to the OS's standard USB drivers, which facilitates and controls communication between the camera and the computer. You can get along fine without the manufacturer's browser in most cases — any photo editing app will do, once the photos are on your computer. But if you don't have the USB shim, in many cases the camera can't communicate with the Mac, and the card in it doesn't appear on the desktop. If that's your situation, Brian, a card reader is the best solution. It simply eliminates the camera from the equation, enabling the standard USB mass storage drivers in your OS to communicate directly with the memory card.

Limnos,

There are no OS9 drivers available for download from the Canon website for the A80, but there is software for the A30, A40, A50 and A60. The A60 software download page suggests that this provides some functionality for the A80.

If spending a few dollars on a USB card reader that will see you through nearly every digital camera past, present and future is too much, you'll have to use a bit of initiative, download what might work for free from Canon and try it out.

No camera manufacturer completely re-writes the USB connectivity protocol between minor camera revisions, so what worked for a Canon camera 5 years ago will almost certainly still work today.

eww wrote: — but of the seven or eight different cameras I've used from time to time, none fit that description:

Whoa. Please tell me what kind of cameras you were using so I can avoid them!

That's odd to me, as when you buy a memory stick for a camera, they are almost always pre-formatted to the base MS-DOS file format. The memory sticks for the Canon Rebel were fully usable in the Mac that was running 8.6 and a new HP PeeCee that was running XP - and this was in August I was playing with that rig.

I'll have to check this out more, it just makes no sense to lock a camera's photographic output to a specific software application. If Micro$oft were making cameras I'd expect something like that..

Deb.

Deb,

I think eww's issue is with attaching cameras to a Mac with OS9 and having the card in the camera appear as a hard disk in the Mac's Finder without the drivers installed for the camera.

I've never had it work for me either, with Kodak, Minolta and Nikon cameras. I have used Kodak and Minolta drivers to access the memory card in the camera, but only once. Transferring pictures directly from the camera EATS batteries. I use 4Gb and 1Gb CF primarily for the Nikon D100, but I have used them in my Minolta (and once as a test in the Kodak), transferring my usual 600Mb of photos (over USB v1.1) would exhaust a fully charged set of batteries and take FOREVER.

So I gladly invested in a £7 PCMCIA CF card adapter/reader (I actually got it free with a £200 1Gb CF card but it was priced at £7). Card adapter is the way to go.

Remember also, that all of this is OS9, with OSX and newer Macs, you have driver availability and USB v2 / Firewire.

Hi, Deborah: Simon correctly interprets my caveat above. I've used three or four different Canons, two Olympuses, a Pentax S-4, and a very early consumer Nikon, and a couple of others whose identities I've forgotten after printing photos from them once each as favors to friends. In no case did making a USB connection between the camera and the computer result in the memory card being mounted on the desktop without the manufacturer's software installed. In some cases the manufacturer's image browser opened and imported the images automatically or manually, but the card didn't mount on the desktop. In the other cases, both things happened.

I've never had a memory card in a card reader (I've had four different readers, all CardBus) fail to mount on the desktop, without installing anything — until recently, when to my dismay I encountered the increasingly well documented inability of many Macs to read xD cards in card readers (both USB and CardBus, and both in OS 9 and OS X). Mac users should avoid xD cards and the cameras that use them — and boy, do I wish I'd known that before I bought my daughter such a camera for Christmas! Grrrr...

Another vote for PCMCIA (Cardbus) adapers; mine came free w/ the extra card as well and worked w/o troube or additional software or settings when I plugged it into my PB3400. And it works as removeable medium for data storing other files.

Just as a bit of fun with one of my PCMCIA adapters,

eww might remember this, I re-formatted my 1Gb and 4Gb cards as Mac HFS+, then installed Mac OS9.2.2 (on the 1Gb card) and Mac OSX 10.3 (on the 4Gb card), but alas I'm not able to get my PBG4s to boot of them. That would have REALLY impressed me.

That may be one for the future as Flash memory (CompactFlash especially) capacity and speed are increasing a lot faster than 2.5" hard disk.