I’m not much of a shutterbug, but I had some older pics that I figured I should upload to Flickr, just for kicks. It was a tad tougher than expected.
The pics in question were taken over seven years ago, and I asked for digital copies on CD as well. I hadn’t dealt with PhotoCDs before, so I didn’t really know what to expect or ask for, and I wound up getting a disc with the photos in Kodak’s FlashPix format. Flickr, of course, doesn’t exactly want them in that format…
I had trouble even just viewing them myself. A viewer program was provided on the disc, but it was written back in the Windows 95 era and failed to even install on my XP system. There was also a Mac viewer, though it required OS 9 and couldn’t do batch conversions. OS X could recognize the format, but Preview would not display them correctly. And the image converter I usually use on Linux, ImageMagick, claimed support for FlashPix but didn’t have it compiled in on my Slackware install.
I then turned to Google to try and find other programs that would help, but nearly all of the results are commercial programs. Although it would save time, I wasn’t about to pay just to convert a small handful of files from a format that Kodak charged me to convert to in the first place, just on principle…
There was a free program though, NConvert, with ports available for many platforms. The Linux version wouldn’t run though, expecting the library setup of Fedora Core 4 instead. The OS X version ran, but didn’t have the FlashPix support enabled. And finally, the Windows version ran, and would even display thumbnails of my pics, but then failed to view the full-size image and would complain about an ‘unknown format’ when trying to convert them. Sigh.
I was rapidly running out of options, so I finally just grabbed the ‘libfpx’ library and manually rebuilt ImageMagick, but it was again for naught. Although it now recognized the format, errors still occurred during conversion. By now I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the pics themselves, or if the format had changed in the meantime and older pics were now incompatible.
At this point I didn’t really want to spend any more time searching for solutions, and wasn’t even sure the commercial programs would work any better, so I went back to the start and used the Mac OS 9 viewer to load and resave the images as JPEGs. It was a pain in the ass since you have to do them one-by-one, and the horrible GUI doesn’t remember your settings so I had to keep reselecting the output format and options and correcting the filename, but at least it worked.
I’m pretty sure that ten or twenty years from now we’ll still be able to view GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs with no trouble at all, but it looks like this format is already headed to the dustbin.
Better get them all converted soon.