Bridge 2.0 (included with Photoshop CS3) now features the Get Photos from Camera command that gives you lots of options when downloading your pictures from a memory card to your hard drive. Yes, you could just drag and drop those same images without using Bridge, but you may want to take a second look first.
Get Photos from Camera allows you to create a custom download folder, modify the file names of your pictures, and even add your copyright information -- all during the normal downloading process. So in about the same time as it would take you to drag and drop, you've accomplished a lot of housekeeping too. Plus, you can preview thumbnails of your photos before you initiate the download, and only pick the ones you want. Try that with drag and drop. And if that wasn't good enough, then how about Bridge's ability to save copies of your masters to a separate drive... automatically during the download!
All you have to so is launch Bridge, go to File > Get Photos from Camera, and make a few choices. The first I recommend is a metadata preset with all of your contact and copyright info. Using Bridge is particularly nice for devices such as the iPhone that doesn't automatically add your metadata to its captured images.
Time to get organized. If you haven't made the move to Apple Aperture or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom yet, then Bridge 2.0 will give you much of the same capability when importing your images.
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I'm glad you blogged about this, Derrick. It was one of my more pleasant discoveries when I installed CS3 on my new MacBook Pro back in late July. I used to prefer the Canon tools to whatever else I had. Now I spend a lot of time in Bridge and I haven't felt the need to go find my Canon CD yet.
The only change in my workflow has been that I used to use the Canon import utility to erase the memory card before ejecting and now I have to Erase All or Format back in the camera. I realize that my new workflow is probably your recommended practice.
Do you know of a way to have bridge automatically delete image files from a camera or data card after importing? The Windows Vista import tool has this option and it's really convenient.