I misplaced the manual for my Canon Powershot A570 digital camera recently. It’s around the house somewhere and it’ll turn up eventually but I needed to refer to it today about the macro function and different shooting settings. When I thought about it, I remembered bookmarking a site called Diplodocs which is an online repository of almost 2 million downloadable manuals and headed there. You can search for instruction manuals by manufacturer, by device model number or name or browse them alphabetically.

I just entered the make and model and sure enough there were the pdfs of all the manuals for the PowerShot A570.

I downloaded the ones I needed. Incidentally, I found that you have to rename your manual once you download it as subsequent downloads from that webpage will all have the same name and would overwrite it but given that the download name was just a long number, that wasn’t a bad idea anyway.

So now I have the manuals I need in digital format. And there actually better than the paper version as they’re searchable, and they won’t get lost! So when my old manual turns up as it will, I’ll just recycle it. I need to cut down on clutter anyway… but that’s another post for another day.