If you have a digital photo camera it is very likely that you will want to save your pictures on your PC. In this tutorial we will show you how to do that on Windows Vista.

Before we begin you should look at your photo camera's battery status. If you have low batteries, you should change or recharge them. If your camera will remain without power during the importing process, your memory card might get damaged.

After checking the battery status, connect your digital camera to the PC. There are three ways to do that: using a USB cable, a Firewire cable or thorough a Bluetooth connection. For this tutorial we will use a USB cable to connect our camera to the PC.

First, connect your digital photo camera and press the Power On button. Windows Vista will detect the camera and will install the appropriate drivers.

After the drivers installation is finished, the AutoPlay menu will pop-up.

Select the option Import pictures using Windows.

In the bottom right corner of the screen, a small window asking if you want to tag the pictures will appear. You can type a general tag for the pictures that you are about to import. Tags can be very useful for organizing and finding your pictures.

If you don't want to insert a tag just leave that space blank and click on Import.

If you want to customize the import settings, click the Options button. Now you can change the following settings: where to import the pictures (the default folder is Pictures - if you want another folder click on Browse and select or create that folder), the name of the folder (by default the name of the folder will be the date when the pictures are imported plus the tag you typed) and the file naming convention.

When you have finished, click the OK button. These settings will apply to all the pictures you will import from now on.

After you click on Import, Windows Vista starts moving all your pictures. If you want the pictures to be deleted from your camera after the import process is finished, click the Erase after importing checkbox.

After the process is finished, Windows Photo Gallery will start and you will be able to see all the pictures that were imported.

Now, turn off your camera and remove the connection cable from your PC.

NOTE: For this tutorial we used a HP Compaq nx7400 and an HP Photosmart M307 digital camera.

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