OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Importing Media

Chances are good that you’ll want to import pictures or video from your digital camera or DV camcorder someday. It’s a piece of cake. So in the following sections, I show you how easy it is to get your digital photos into your Mac and help you get started with digital video (which is a bit more complex).

In the sections that follow, I focus on applications that are a part of OS X. Technically, that doesn’t include the iLife applications. What I mean is that if you bought an OS X Mountain Lion upgrade in a box at a store, it doesn’t include iLife applications, such as iMovie and iPhoto. Your Mac almost certainly came with the iLife suite preinstalled, but depending upon how old your Mac is, you might not have the current versions, and the various versions all work slightly differently. See the nearby sidebar “Living the iLife” for more details about iLife.

Downloading photos from a camera

This is the Mac I’m talking about, so of course, getting pictures from your digital camera onto your hard drive is a pretty simple task. Here’s how to do it step by step using Image Capture:

1. Turn on the camera, and set it to review or playback mode.

This step might not be necessary ...