See iChat images sent by Windows AIM users

Sep 21, '06 07:30:06AM

Contributed by: robg

My brother was trying to get iTunes 7 running properly on his PC and asked me for some help via iChat (AIM on the Windows side). He sent me a screenshot from his PC, but instead of seeing the actual image in iChat, all I saw was the blank icon as seen at right.

After a bit of experimentation, I figured out the relatively easy (but annoying) workaround needed to view his screenshot. Drag the image out of iChat onto your desktop (or other convenient location). The result will be a file named (I believe; this is from memory) *UNTITLED* or something like that, with the same blank icon. To make the image viewable, all you need to do is rename it, and add .bmp at the end of the name. The .bmp extension means bitmap, which is the image format that Windows uses when you take a screenshot.

After changing the name, you can view the image in Preview (or any other app that will display .bmp files).

Note that this doesn't happen for me with all PC users -- sometimes screen caps come through perfectly within iChat. I have no idea as to what causes one behavior versus the other...

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