Move photographs to a desktop computer.

[BrickyBrian]

MY wife has a Samsung Tablet which in spite of her limited technical ability she has managed to collect a large number of photographs on. I know nothing about these devices. My wife would like to move the photographs to my desktop computer so that she can place on DVDs. Could someone please advise me.

 

[psionandy]

The easiest way to do it is to syms your photos with Google photos and then download them straight from the website.


That way you get a backup for free

 

[chanchan05]

The tablet would have come with a cable to connect to a computer. You can just plug the tablet into a computer and navigate to the DCIM and Pictures folders and copy the pictures from there to a desktop just like if you are using a flash drive.

 

[Bri the Tech Guy]

Adding on to chanchan05's correct observation, make sure your device is turned on the first time you connect it to the computer. You will typically get a prompt asking if you want to allow a file transfer connection via USB, and only get it once. Once you've answered in the affirmative any time you plug in the tablet its internal storage should be accessible on the PC just like that of a USB drive or SD card.

My Samsung devices just have a DCIM folder under the root level and Camera under that where pictures are stored.

 

[svim]

I also think installing the Google Photos app is good suggestion. Using a USB cable for backups requires the user to manually connect their mobile device to a computer, often requiring installing drivers and then manually setting up some sort of backup routine. The Google Photos app will automatically do backups and syncing via WiFi connectivity, and store your photo archive into your online Google account, which will then be accessible not just on the one computer with the manually backed up files but on any computer with online access.
Link the Google Photos app to the Google Drive app (just enable it in either app's Settings menu) on your phone, and from then on you just use a computer's web browser to access your entire photo archive, either using the Google Photos interface ( https://photos.google.com ), and/or access the actual photo files themselves ( https://drive.google.com ).

But whatever option you choose, set up some kind of backup solution ASAP. If all her photos are located just on her phone that's a really risky thing to do. Smartphones just cannot be relied upon as long term storage.

 

[Bri the Tech Guy]

Oh, I should hasten to add that I have nothing against using Google Photos as a "backup backup." The default settings for Google Photos generally reduces the resolution of the photos that most phones take pretty significantly, although they're just fine for snapshots and sharing with friends. You can set it to keep original resolution but that puts a strict size limit on what Google Photos will store for you.

I always copy my photos (or cut and paste if I don't want them to remain on the device) to my computer as the backup, and have a routine full system image backup routine for the computer itself.

I don't care what the device is, including disk drives - nothing can be relied upon as the sole long term storage location for any electronic media. If it's important you have a minimum of two copies. If it's critical, you have three, with one of the backups kept in a location where the source itself and primary backup is not kept.