Chapter 9. Multimedia Fun: Photos, Music, and Video

In addition to serving as your portable office, your netbook can also keep you entertained when the work is done. You can pull in photos from your digital camera, rock out to music files, and enjoy video clips.

True, your netbook’s small screen and minimalist video card can’t replace your home theater system—or even a desktop PC system with a sizeable monitor and decent external speakers. But hey, neither of those fits in your backpack with room to spare, and a netbook screen is still larger than those in many portable DVD players.

Since most netbooks lack a built-in disc drive, this chapter shows you how to work around that little problem to get music and movies on it. You’ll also learn how to import and organize your digital photos, turning the netbook into a really, really big photo album.

Importing Digital Photos

You have a camera full of photos you want to do things with—edit them, organize them, email them to people, upload them to the Web, and so on. The first step is moving them onto your netbook. Your netbook includes simple software to harvest the pictures from the camera, but you can get a dedicated photo-management program like Picasa.

In many cases, you can just connect the camera to the netbook with the camera’s USB cable. When you do so, the netbook thinks, “Hey, there’s a camera connected to me! I bet there are pictures to import!” Both Windows and Ubuntu automatically detect the presence of the camera and open appropriate ...

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