My boss, Dale, is a photo buff who’s considering adding a new digital camera to his life. His friend has an appealing Fuji that’s at the top of Dale’s wish list. Just to make things a little more enticing for Dale, his friend sent him a CD of hi-rez images to show off the camera’s quality.
Problem was, Dale couldn’t import the Jpegs into iPhoto. “What the heck is going on here?” he asked.
Dale tried a couple of workarounds to no avail, then brought me the CD, which I promptly opened up. Everything looked harmless enough. But darn if I couldn’t import the images either.
I opened one picture directly in Photoshop 7 and did a little snooping around. Ah Ha! His friend had unknowingly saved the Jpeg as a “progressive scan.” I saved it again as “Baseline (Standard)” Jpeg, and the new file imported into iPhoto just fine.
I’m sure someday iPhoto will import just about anything. But for the moment, keep an eye on the formats you use. And for Jpegs, stay far away from “progressive scans.”
BTW: Both David Pogue and myself will be leading sessions on iPhoto at our upcoming Mac OS X conference.
Two Types of Progressive Scans
One reader dropped me a note remarking that he can import photos no problem into iPhoto from his camera that "records" images using progressive scan technology.
This is different than the progressive scan Jpeg compression used in Photoshop for Web images.
So, progressive scan cameras: OK. Progressive scan Jpegs in Photoshop: Not OK
Other bugs with the import function - SMB
Progressive Scans don't seem to be the only thing that iPhoto's import function struggles with.
I've been getting problems importing (JPG) images into iPhoto from my Windows Server drive, which I link to from my iMac using OS X SMB networking. I point the import at the source directory on the Windows machine and the images appear to come across OK, but when I view them in iPhoto each image is only partially complete, with the upper portion of the image being solid black.
If I manually copy the same directory of images from the Windows machine to the iMac's hard drive, then import the images from locally from the Mac's hard drive, the images import OK.
So, iPhoto import bug or OS X SMB weakness? Anyone else found this and have any ideas?
photoshop has problems too
it seems to be a general os x weakness, as photshop files have the same problems. however, copying them to the local harddrive does not always solve the problem...