what good is a camera-phone if the pictures are trapped there?

[cellio]

Dear Lazyweb,

My new cell phone comes with a camera. That's not why I bought it (I'm indifferent to cameras), but, well, so long as it's there... But -- how do I get the photos off the phone and to someplace where they can do some good (i.e. my computer)? Asking Google suggests that I buy a cable and some software, assuming I can find some that's compatable with my phone, which so far isn't working out for me.

I know it's possible to post photos to LJ, so I went down that path, but I got blocked on "enter your cell phone's email address in the authorization list" (my cell phone's what? How would I know?), and side-effects of my Google searches suggest that Verizon is going to charge me for that anyway. Is that the case? For those of you who post pictures, what are you doing?

Comments

[geekosaur]

Verizon is horrible about that. Even when phones support ways to get photos off them that don't coat airtime, Verizon disables that functionality. And generally they get the phone manufacturers to make them pre-disabled phones anyway, so they can make sure they can charge airtime to transfer stuff.

Your phone's email address: see http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=details.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

Some phones have SD cards; you can get the pictures off of that (I know my daughter's Audiovox (Verizon) does). But other than that, it's all a trap to get you to get a data plan.

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

I use my cellphone to email my photos to Flickr which has a setting to auto post pictures to a specified journal.

If you have an account, you can find out your personalized email upload link here: http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/ I send my phone pics to the email given to me under the area that says "Upload to blog?"

Hope this helps.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

I text them to an email account.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Many/most phones will let you create a multi-media text message to get the photo off there. Make sure that you won't be charged way too much for those photo transfers.

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

I got the cable. It wasn't the genuine Nokia cable, but an after-market one that was about 1/3 the price and did the same job. The software was one that came with Linux, Kamera I think it's called, although there are other bits of software that can do it. Most phones have a USB cable that can plug into a PC, and when it does that the phone will ask you whether you want to use it in "data storage mode". If you say yes to that then the phone works like a USB disk, you can just use your favourite file manager to drag and drop the photos off the phone onto whatever directory on your PC you want them on.

[wrenb.livejournal.com]

I checked the specs but I can't tell if your phone uses Bluetooth. With my new phone (old one had no camera) I turn on the Bluetooth on it and my laptop, then just grab the photos off of the phone. How you do that with a Windows machine, I don't know.
Sorry, this hasn't ended up being particularly informative, has it? But if it works for you, it'll be free instead of a text message.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I'm able to email my photos to my email account, download them from there into my computer, then upload them to LJ's Scrapbook.