trouble downloading photos from card reader-OS9.1 G4 Cube

Do you have another memory card that you could try? Or do you know someone that has a digital camera that you could insert their memory card into your reader to see if their card has the same problem?

One of the problems in trying to solve your problem is that there are too many vairables. Could be your camera, your memory card or your computer/graphic application.

Cheers, Tom

Jim,

Excellent progress.
So we know it's not the Camera. I was beginning to suspect that it was writing duff EXIF data to the JPG causing Photoshop to complain. Or it was using a custom colour space (also stored in the JPG) which Photoshop and GC weren't happy about. None of this turned out to be the case, as the files from the CD open OK.

We know it's not the apps you use, for the same reason.

So it must be in the copying of the files from SD card to Mac. Can you tell us what format the mounted SD card appears as ? Do a Get Info on the mounted desktop icon, tell us what you see. I'd assumed that as most cameras format their cards to FAT32, that's what would happen with yours. But newer cameras may do something "newer", my Nikon D100 is nearly 4 years old now and uses FAT32, I've not bought anything since.

Could be a few missing extensions that would allow the successful copying of the files. Don't know what they are, until we know the format of the card. Foreign File Access, UDF Volume Access, or ISO 9660 File Access ?

James,

Apologies, I should have said, the .jpe's I think, are preview pictures. These may be created by the camera, if the picture is previewed (on the camera), or by some app that has been used to preview the pictures on the card on a PC. My old Minolta DiMage 7 used to do the same.

Don't worry about the files ending in .JPG and them being a different format. You're on an OS9 Mac, and all it's apps are extremely clever when it comes to opening files. Even though copying the files from a PC Disk might cause the File Helper (see it in Internet Explorer Preferences) to associate the file with a particular app, both JPG and TIFF files describe themselves as such in their file header, like the first 32 bytes of the file or so. GC and Photoshop use this to determine which form of uncompression to use.

Jim and Simon: I've been watching this thread with interest and curiosity, but without being able to contribute anything further. Now I have the following thoughts:

Since GC and PE both routinely create their own previews from any JPEG image without the camera having created one separately, it seems likely to me that the .jpe preview images Jim sees are created only for the benefit of the software that was shipped with the camera — or, as Simon suggests, possibly only for use by the camera's own image-display function. Either way, those .jpe files are probably superfluous for your purposes, Jim, and they need not, and maybe should not, be transferred to your Mac…

… except that if the .jpe files also store metadata about the images in a format used by the camera maker's proprietary software (written mainly for PCs, one automatically assumes, and then ported, probably clumsily, to the Mac), then maybe that data is not also stored in the standard locations where GC and PE expect to find it, and consequently they see the accompanying .jpg "real" images as corrupt.

I liked Simon's question about the format of the SD card, and I hope you'll post an answer to it, Jim. Also, when you view the SD card's window on your Mac, are all the files — .jpg, .jpe and .tif — stored in the same folder together, or are there separate folders on the card for the different types of image files?

…and independently the guy suggested checking to see if the card reader was compatible with OS9.1. I have sent an email to the company I found on the website; will post answer if I get one. Never dreamed card readers might be operating system dependent.

The reader's USB 2.0 (high speed USB) capability is not supported by any Mac OS lower than 10.2.8, but all USB 2.0 devices that I'm aware of are backward-compatible with USB 1.1 and will work at the far slower USB 1.1 speed which OS 9 supports. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the device would transfer data at all if it were, in some way I can't imagine, incompatible with OS 9. I don't think that's the issue.

Zio won't have anything to tell you, I suspect; the packaging of their products makes no mention of using them with Macs, and I doubt that they want to be bothered with questions about Mac support. Nevertheless, if the reader adheres to the USB 2.0 standard, it should work fine with Macs.

Some of the new digicams claim to be compatible only with versions of OS 10.x. Does this imply that pics cannot be downloaded and read properly in OS9.x, if read from a camera card thru a [compatible] card reader? Assume it means the downloadable software that comes with the digicam is incompatible with OS9.x, but is that really important?

In many cases, it's the proprietary software bundled with the camera that the company is really talking about. In the case of a camera equipped with USB 2.0 for direct transfer of images to the computer, OS 10.2.8 or 10.3.4 or higher is required for the connection to be made at USB 2.0 speed. But if you can stand to wait for images to be transferred at USB 1.1 speed instead, and you don't want to use the camera maker's usually less-than-great proprietary software anyway, you can often get by without the required OS version. There may be some cameras with which that won't work, though — and it could be quite hard to find out which ones, since camera makers are loath to suggest that their devices might work with anything less than the minimum hardware and software they're guaranteed to work with.

The $1900 Olympus camera I bought four years ago came with proprietary OS 9-compatible image browsing and editing software that was (to put it politely) amateurish in design and pitiful in its limited capabilities, especially by comparison with the $30 shareware GraphicConverter — one of the best software values available anywhere at any price. The latest updated OS X version of the Olympus app is different but no better, and the proprietary apps I've seen from other camera manufacturers are similarly weak. There is no good reason for anyone to use them, except in those few unpardonable cases where the camera maker has designed the camera not to transfer pictures to the computer any other way. There's no good reason for anyone to buy those cameras in the first place.

Any camera that uses a removable flash memory card should be able to be used with any OS that supports a USB card reader, including OS 9 and even OS 8.6. The only exception I can think of offhand is the xD-Picturecard form factor, which some versions of OS X seem to have trouble reading; I don't know about OS 9. All cameras that I'm aware of format their removable cards in the PC-centric FAT32 format, which all Macs have been able to recognize and handle with aplomb since it was introduced to the PC world many years ago. So only a hardware problem with the card reader or a corruption or missing component in the standard OS software on a Mac should prevent the correct reading and copying of a file from a memory card to a Mac's hard drive. That's what makes your problem so mystifying.