Direct Use With Usb Camera Options

[Graham]

As a long time user of PMView I now find it doesn't work well with a recently purchased camera. This camera does not appear as a drive letter, instead it shows in "My Computer" as a specific camera device.

This provides a significantly reduced menu of options for each image, none of which can involve PMView. There is a Preview option, which opens Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, a decidely poor piece of software. I would very much like to have PMView to take over the Preview option.

Further, PMView's Open dialog doesn't show this camera device, so I can't get pictures into PMView that way. I actually have to use something other than PMView to put the images on my hard drive, and then open PMView on them, which is quite inconvenient.

From the reading I've done, it doesn't look as though it would be very difficult to have PMView take over the Preview option, but I've no idea how difficult it would be to have the camera usable in the Open dialog. Either would be a big improvement though.

FWIW, my wife connected my camera to her computer, she opened Photoshop Elements 4 to see if it could access the camera and it immediately provided a dialog with thumbnails and the abilty to process the pictures. (BTW, she uses PMView too.)

Basic manipulations of camera images seems such a natural thing for PMView to do, and I'm disappointed I can't do it with this camera. Any chance this capability will be added any time soon?

[ronlaw]

Hello Peter (and all)

Perhaps you didn't realise, but many new cameras don't use drive letters. Instead they use PTP protocol, a new standard support by XP onwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol

To be clear, I think PTP sucks and much prefer USB mass storage. But it's common now.

There are other protocols as well that don't use drive letters.

If PMView is serious about importing pictures from cameras, drive letters is the tip of the iceberg, a lot more work is required.