Once your images are imported you can view them by device, which is only really useful if you use a few different cameras, or by month - which is more useful. You can also view pictures which you've just imported, handy if you want to quickly look through a set of new photos. You can also place pictures into albums, but frustratingly, you can't give the albums a name, instead the box will assign a seemingly random name to it based on the first picture in the album.

If you have a lot of photos and you don't know the exact month they were taken, it can be quite a laborious process trying to find the ones you need. There's no other way to search through photos, such as file name, geo location, tags etc - which again seems a bit of a shortfall.

It's worth pointing out that although the Canon Connect Station CS100 will import raw format files, it won't display them - something to think about if you shoot only in raw format (although of course if you do, it's likely that you'll be editing and converting them to JPEG files which you can send to the CS100 at a later date).

Regardless, you can view images in a slideshow, look at the shooting data for the image taken, or send it to a wireless printer for printing. You need to set up your wireless printer in the Canon Connect Station CS100's preferences area before you can send it, but assuming that the printer is connected to the same network as the CS100, it's a quick and easy process.

Speaking of the preferences section, if you head here you can make changes to certain other settings, such as how long images are displayed in the slideshow, whether a border should be applied, and whether to display the date the image was taken. You can also opt to play music when you're watching a slideshow. Sadly, there's a set of fairly cheesy “musak” style tracks here, with no possibility to add your own to match your own tastes.

Another way that you can print images is from the home page of the Canon Connect Station CS100. You can select Print and then scroll through all of your images to choose one to print - again this can be quite a laborious process once you have a lot of images on the device.

Although you can't use NFC with other devices, you can send images from a mobile phone or tablet by browsing to the CS100's IP address on a browser on your smartphone or tablet. To find the IP address, go to wireless settings on the CS100 and it'll display the IP address (such as 198.168.1.112). Enter that into a browser (so long as the other device is connected to the same wireless network) and you'll be able to see photos that you can download from the CS100 or upload your own photos.

Or at least that's the theory - I was unable to get it to upload any photos to the device - a connection failed message was displayed every time - but even if it did work, it's a very long-winded process choosing photos to be uploaded anyway. You have to select each picture manually for batches of six, there's no way to quickly select a large amount of pictures.

There's a USB port on the back of the Canon Connect Station CS100, which you can use to make a back up copy of the contents of the CS100. Sadly, you can't use it to import images from another USB drive.

One of the key selling points of the Canon Connect Station CS100 is that you're supposed to be able to share your images via social networks directly from it. In order to do this, you must first register with Canon Image Gateway, and then associate your social accounts (such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr) to the Gateway. Once you've done this, you should be able to share to such networks from the CS100's “Send” screen - however, once again I was unable to get this to work, and there's no help or trouble shooting available on the CS100 itself in order to figure out what's going on. How often you'd want to share an image from a hard drive like this questionable, but it's frustrating either way that it doesn't work.

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