In the days before computers, (remember those?) sharing photos typically consisted of removing your wallet and flipping it open to show off pictures of your kids or your dog. Occasionally there was a bit of lint you needed to first remove, and the corners of the photos more often than not were a bit dog-eared. Maybe that was part of the charm. But before the pictures of Spot even made it into your wallet, they first had to be processed by a film lab. That meant taking your film to a grocery store or camera shop and having them process them, a wait of at least a day or two. You also had to worry about each and every shot you took, since there was no such thing as do-overs with traditional photographic film.

Happily, those days are now behind us. With digital cameras firmly enthroned now as the preferred method for taking pictures, (although smart phones are rapidly making inroads) it is now easier than ever to take virtually unlimited numbers of pictures, following which they can quickly and easily be transferred onto a computer for editing and sharing in a wide variety of formats.

There are three basic ways to get pictures from your camera to your computer. The first is the plug the cable that came with your computer into your camera, and to then plug the cable (usually USB) into your computer. Most computers automatically start to download the photos from the camera onto your computer. A second way to transfer the files is through something called Bluetooth. This is a wireless connection between your camera and the computer. By turning on the Bluetooth setting, you should be able to start uploading from your camera to the computer. A third way is to put the memory card from your camera into a digital media card reader and to then download the pictures to your computer. Now the real fun can begin.