Hi.
What you need to do is connect the camera with the USB cable and then turn it on. The camera will not appear as an external drive on your desktop. Generally, with a Mac, ApplePhoto launches. When this happens just quite the application, don't let it do the importing for you as it places all your photographs in a sealed package which can only be accessed by launching the application. instead, the application you need is in the applications folder, it's called ImageCapture.
Launch ImageCapture and you will see your camera listed on the top left corner.Click on the camera and it will list all the contents of the camera in the main window. At the bottom of the screen there is a small drop down panel which will allow you to direct the application to save to a particular folder, you can either pick something from the drop down menu or at the very bottom of the list, select 'other' and then designate where you want to save to, such as a new older on your desktop. That's what I do and then transfer to online storage and a portable drive. Apple, by default, will try to get you to use ApplePhoto or else save all to the 'pictures' folder. By saving to your own created folder it stops the possibility of duplicate names, which could happen if allowing your computer save to the 'pictures' by default.