Apple does a very good job integrating support for downloading photos and images from iPhone and digital cameras using iPhoto. But sometimes all you want is to pull a couple of photos quick and easy. Or (and this is truly unbelievable!) you happened to have no iLife on your Mac.

Here comes Image Capture to the rescue. Image Capture is a handy application that is a part of every Mac OS X installation. You can find it under Applications in Finder. Image Capture provides no tools to organize images into albums, but it does help with retrieving images from iPhone, digital cameras and even scanners. And it does it well.

To get photos from an iPhone, first, connect it to your Mac. Then start Image Capture application either from Finder’s Applications folder or by searching Spotlight:

Once running, Image Capture recognizes iPhone and displays its name in the title together with showing iPhone icon on the left:

On this first screen you can change download location; choose to run additional tasks like cropping or building a slideshow; and change options. Once you decided ‘where to’ and ‘how’, the last remaining question is ‘what’. To download everything, click Download All button. Otherwise Download Some… will open a browser window, where you can make your image selection:

Hit Download button. You are done!

P.S. Did you know that Image Capture can be used to monitor a remote location? The answer is in the Help.