Getting digital cameras to work with OS X 10.1

Canon support Ellis Pritchard could not get his Canon IXUS V digital camera to work under Mac OS X 10.1 - until he found this work-around. The solution may work with other cameras as well. For example, the European Canon IXUS V is called the PowerShot S110 or Digital Elph in the U.S. The procedure Ellis described involved using Terminal. We offer an Aqua-alternative for doing the same thing:

1. In the /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/Type4Camera.app/Contents folder, there is a file called info.plist which contains all the USB IDs for the devices supported by this driver. Enabling support for the IXUS V is simply a matter of adding a new entry for the IXUS's ID, which can be found using the Apple System Profiler.
2. Open this plist file with Property List Editor (included on Apple's Developer Tools CD) or a text editor. You will likely need to use a utility such as Pseudo to open it with root access.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the <dict> section. Add another <dict> entry with the following data (or whatever data you found in Apple System Profiler): product:0x3052 and vendor:0x04A9.
4. Save the file.
5. Log out and back in. Plug in your camera, put it in View mode and turn it on. Image Capture will open and you can download your images!

Ellis adds: "The one proviso I found was that you can't seem to see/download locked images; this may be a general feature of Image Capture for all I know."

CoolPix support Marc Costa writes: "In spite of being on the supported list Image Capture does not recognize my CoolPix 990." We don't know if a similar work-around would apply here.