It's easy enough to copy—ingest—photos from your camera, card, or phone to your computer: Just mount the camera or card as a drive and copy them, or use whatever came with your computer, such as Image Capture on the Mac. But all that gives you is a copy.

Ingestion is a great opportunity to do more, before it's too late:

• Look at a preview to decide which photos you want to ingest.
• Rename the image files and sort them into folders (by date, for example).
• Make a backup copy.
• Add metadata: caption, keywords, copyright notice, and so on.
• Geotag the images automatically from a GPS track log, or manually by choosing a location on a map, to mark them with their latitude, longitude, and altitude.
• Convert raw files to Adobe's DNG format.

Requirements:
OS X 10.6+
64-bit Intel