Thursday, February 21, 2013

Change Upload Directory for Windows Image Acquisition

With each new year, I like to change the upload directory for my Canon Elph 100 digital camera. This year I fell behind and did not get around to changing my upload directory until today.

I no longer wished for the camera to upload its pictures to c:\photos\2012. I wanted it to upload to c:\photos\2013. The question was how to communicate my intention to the computer. Naturally, human memory being what it is, I had forgotten my trick.

After poking around in the Canon utilities, I came to the conclusion that none of them would serve my purpose. I looked in the usual places where configuration files are stored in Windows and examined some .xml files, but they didn't have the setting I was looking for. Finally, intuition led me to fire up Regedit, a very useful program in Windows XP. I searched (F5) for a portion of my upload directory name--photos\2012. I found my upload directory mentioned in a couple of places, but kept tapping F3 for the next search result until I found the one for WIA, an acronym that jogged my memory. The actual program transferring photos from my camera to my computer was not a Canon utility at all. It was a Microsoft utility--Windows Image Acquisition--WIA for short. I had forgotten, but long ago, I opted to use WIA instead of Canon's stuff, because WIA is faster and doesn't require a bunch of clicks. I changed WIA's directory to photos\2013 and did not even have to reboot. WIA handled the next upload properly, and that was that.

I never did discover how to make WIA auto-delete files once they are uploaded, but as it only requires a single keypress--"Y"--that is no big potato.

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