Q: I have a Verizon LG Vortex phone and I want to move my pictures off of my phone to my computer. How do I make this transfer?
A: There are generally two ways to get images off of your LG Vortex and on to your PC. Let’s look at each in turn (and if you are not comfortable doing these steps, call Verizon tech support. You don’t want to make a mistake and possibly lose data).
1) Use the included Phone-USB cable that’s included with the Vortex. You should be able to plug in one end of this cable to your phone, and the other to your computer. Once plugged in your phone should appear as any hard drive or memory card or attached storage would — as a disk. Simply double click it in My Computer if it doesn’t appear automatically and you should be able to open your camera’s pictures in a folder. Once the folder is open, you can copy or move the files (or even delete if you need to).
Please note that getting the phone to connect sometimes can work easily and sometimes is tricky. If you try to connect it and it doesn’t show up as a drive, consider calling Verizon tech support, as there are few things that you can do to get the PC to recognzie the phone, but you need to be careful here about data integrity.
2) Use the MicroSD card. Depending upon how the LG Vortex is configured, all of the movies and pictures may be stored on the Micro-SD card that’s in the phone. Check your manual for how to remove the card, but if you look on the side of your phone there’s a small area that opens up to reveal the card. If you carefully push down on the card, it should “bounce” back at you so you can remove it. Note that some phones are not setup to write the pictures directly to the card, so removing the card may not help you. If you follow the steps below and you see no data on the card or the PC asks you to format the card, stop there and call Verizon tech support to have them help you. There are ways to copy the images from the cameras memory to the card, but this technique can get dicey. So in this case your best bet would be to connect the phone to the PC directly.
Once you have the card out, you can now use the card with a card reader. Many card readers don’t have a microSD port, so you may need to head down to the local Radio Shack and purchase a MicroSD to SD converter. Usually this item costs around $5 and is simply a regular SD card that has no memory on it — but is simply a holder for a microSD card. If you ask them in the store for a “microSD to SD converter” they will know what you mean. Of course you will need to have a standard SD card reader. Now if you don’t have ANY type of card reader, I’d still recommend you get a 12-in one or an 18-in one card reader, as these devices will allow you to read multiple types of memory cards. Recall that different camera vendors use different cards — old Sony cameras use memory sticks, and newer cameras use SD cards and Compact Flash. So getting a card reader that reads multiple formats will save you time later. That being said, if you really only have a need to read the microSD card, you may be able to find a microSD card reader, or at least a combination reader with a port for microSD. If you are unsure, just ask them at Radio Shack or a simialr store.
Once you have the microSD card in the card reader (or in a regular SD holder and that’s in the card reader), simply head to my computer and open the drive (if it doesn’t open automatically) and then you are free to do what you need to do with your files. You can copy, move, and even delete. Before you do anything directly on the card, however, I recommend that you at least copy the contents of the card to your PC’s hard drive so you have a backup in case something goes awry.
Good luck and happy copying!