DOWNLOADING PICTURES TO YOUR COMPUTER

In addition to sharing images electronically, you also can download your images to your desktop or laptop computer. To do this, you need to simply plug your device into your computer using USB. Then mount your SD card by pulling down the Notifications Bar and selecting USB Connection. Depending on your version of Android, you are either given a simple dialog box with the choice to mount your SD card or a more complex one with several options (see Figure 9.5). If you have the former, select the button to mount the card; if the latter, choose either PC Mode or USB Mass Storage, as either will work in this case. See Chapter 1 for a more thorough explanation of these options.

With the card mounted, your computer should automatically detect your device as a new hard drive. If you use Windows, you are shown a dialog box with a set of options for how to deal with the card. If you have a photo-editing or management tool installed on your computer such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, you should see an option to automatically import the photos into it, which is the easy way to download the images. If you do not have a program that can import for you, select the option to open Windows Explorer.