Fastest Way to Get Pictures from your Camera Card to your Mac

August 24, 2008

Joe Maller asks on Twitter:

what is iPhoto doing that manages grind every other app to a standstill while importing?! Copying JPEGs over USB shouldn’t be this hard

I have no idea, but it’s bad enough that I don’t bother trying to make it work anymore.

I did what any self-respecting geek would do:

I wrote a shell script, and took out most of the vowels when naming it: pics2hd.sh

Long story short:

1) It moves .jpg and .avi files from your SD card (or whatever) to a folder

2) It renames them to the date and time when the picture was taken (handy in case the EXIF data ever gets lost)

3) It ejects the card

4) You have to be comfortable with some basic Terminal.app usage (i.e. you have to know what it means when I say “Download this script, unzip it, chmod 755 it, and put it somewhere in your $PATH)

5) Read the script in BBEdit/TextWrangler whatever for some other important notes and usage instructions

6) No warrantee or guarantee expressed or implied. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces and all of the responsibility. Welcome to adulthood.

7) I welcome improvements, corrections, or questions, but don’t expect much by the way of tech support for this.

8) Free of charge, free to modify, free to whatever you want to do with it.

Download here: pics2hd.sh

  • We HAVE to stop thinking so alike.

    Here's my script, which just slurps the card contents into two separate places (archive | edit), wipes the card, and then ejects it.

    I had hooked this up to a Folder Action to trigger it whenever the card was inserted in Tiger. I should get that running again.

    Interestingly, doing it this way highlights two problems: USB 2.0 is just slow, and the iPhoto import is slow even off the hard drive. Putting them together is double the trouble.
  • Looks like this still works. Sweet!
  • I used to have something sort of like this, but I kind of classify photos into the bucket of things I don't want to have to think about. I love the idea of iPhoto, but it doesn't seem to be working all that well these days. Unfortunately, I could say that about a lot of Apple's stuff of late.
  • The litmus test for me is handing my computer over to my wife and seeing if she can find things. iPhoto usually fails that test, and she resorts to finding pictures on Flickr.

    Unfortunately, I could say that about a lot of Apple’s stuff of late.


    We could all write for a blog called "2007: The Good Old Days of Apple".
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