I’m like a lot of people today in the fact that I carry a phone that has a built in camera with me everywhere I go. In fact for my everyday phone, I have chosen a device that seems to be more of camera (5MP sensor and pretty advanced camera processing software) and it just happens to have a phone as part of its function.

Sure I take the occasional photo that I MMS to my friends, but my own personal habit is I use the camera phone because it is always there and I can take a snapshot of something that I would typically just have missed because I didn’t have a camera. If I don’t send the pictures via MMS and if I don’t email them from the phone as an attachment, how the heck do I get them off the phone?

Some phones store the images on a memory card – typically a micro or miniSD card. With some of these cards, you can get a adapter that then lets you insert the card into a computer SD card reader to copy the photos off. That’s normally a big headache since for many camera phones, removing the memory card involves disassembling your phone to get at the card.

Other methods include (if the carrier has unlocked the functionality), using a USB cable to connect the phone to the computer or using Bluetooth to wirelessly transmit the photos from the phone to the PC. All of this is interesting, but still involves a lot of manual copying of files and photos.

With Creator 10 and Media Manager, we’ve really tried to address this basic need for those of us that would really love to get our photos out from the phone and onto the PC so we can view them in all their full screen glory or perhaps create something like a slideshow or a panorama slide. Syncing is a vital part of this process. Set up the camera phone the first time for syncing, and any new pictures that have been taken since the last time will automatically be backed up and copied onto the PC. That way, you can now print them out, and be confident that if something unfortunate were to happen to your phone, you always have a copy of those snapshots in life somewhere handy...

I would be interested to hear how many of you actually do get your picture off our camera phones or do you just leave them on there until memory has run out? Have any of you had instances where you have lost your phone or even upgraded to a new one and now don’t have your important photos with you?