Image Capture, the unsung little program in Mac OS X's Applications folder, is something of an orphan. It was designed to download pictures from a USB digital camera and then process them automatically (turning them into a webpage, scaling them to emailable size, and so on). Of course, after Image Capture's birth, iPhoto came along, generally blowing its predecessor out of the water.

But Apple has beefed up Image Capture in Panther with some cool, and very poorly documented, features.

For example: Suppose you're sitting in front of one Macintosh, but the digital camera is connected to a second Macintosh downstairs or elsewhere on the network. What's a Mac fan to do?

That situation may not exactly be the scourge of modern computing. But downloading pictures from a camera attached to a different computer can occasionally be useful -- in a graphics studio, for example, when a photographer comes back from the field, camera brimming with fresh shots. He can hook up the camera to his Mac so his editor can peruse the pictures on hers, even while he heads home for a shower.

To share your camera on the network, hook it up, choose Image Capture > Preferences, click the Sharing tab, turn on "Share my devices," and select the camera in question. (This trick works with scanners, too.)

On the other Mac, open Image Capture and choose Devices > "Browse shared devices." Open the flippy triangle, select the camera, click OK, and open Safari (Apple's Web browser). When the thumbnails appear, you can proceed to view and download the photos exactly as though the camera is connected to your Mac.

Now, all digital cameras can share what's currently on their memory cards via the Internet as described above. But if you have one of a few newer models, you can also control the camera remotely. You can spy on whatever's in the room where the camera is, taking snapshots on demand. (Can you say, "Babysittercam"?)

Note: Some of the webcamable cameras are the Canon A60, A70, S400, S50, and G5; HP C618 and 912; Kodak DC280, DC4800, DC5000; and Nikon D1, D1X, and D1H.

Just repeat the steps above. Then, if your camera is one of the compatible models, the Remote Monitor tab springs to life, as shown below, along with the buttons labeled Delete, Take Picture, and so on.

Clicking Take Picture captures a picture exactly as you would if you'd been next to the camera and pressed the shutter button.

If you click the Remote Monitor tab, you see, at full size, whatever the camera is seeing; the image is updated once every minute. (The pictures are blasted to you via the Internet but not captured on the memory card.) Click the light-switch icon to change the shutter interval.