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Recovering lost photos from a SmartMedia card
Authored by: paulrob on Aug 26, '03 04:46:05AM

IMO SM cards are pretty flimsy for camera use. My theory is they flex too much causing intermittent contacts as they are loaded/unloaded? I do outdoor sports and have lost pics with SM. Could have done with knowing about PhotoRescue before now! My solution: use CF instead as they are more robust. Fortunately, my camera has a dual SM/CF slot. Never had a prob with CF in this respect - and they are the same price. Although I see from other posters maybe I've just been lucky.

Here's a tip. Apparently, reformatting cards frequently is a good idea. To save cam batteries I did this on the Mac, FAT formatting the card. No probs - except for 1 card, which worked fine - until I reformatted it. Switched camera on and - WHOA, DID IT NOT LIKE THAT! Card works fine on the Mac, but to my camera, pure poison. Do Macs cause format probs on some cards? Re-reformatting the card in the camera failed. Moral is: never reformat a card unless it's in the camera - may drain batteries, but batteries are cheaper than cards!

Finally, hooking my Olympus camera up to iPhoto is fine so long as I'm not trying to download RAW files. iPhoto recognises the camera manufacturer and model, and downloads JPG and TIFF, but not RAW files (slightly $%£@!&*, but understandable.) I wrote a Applescript to download the files automatically, with the intention of converting them to TIFF on the Mac with Photoshop, then importing them into iPhoto, all as a batch process. Unfortunately, the Olympus-supplied Photoshop RAW2TIFF plugin refused to accept batch processing (very *&@£$%^&!)

I have used Vuescan before now to hook up to a Nikon scanner. The OSX version of the scanner software kept crashing, and was tiresome to use. There have been posts about Vuescan before. But nobody seems to have mentioned that Vuescan also has a 'scan from file' option that will read Olympus, Canon, Nikon RAW formats. The Olympus option works fine - and with the "System Events" plugin from Apple, Vuescan can be scripted (I've not finished the script but have done enough to be satified that it'll work.) Vuescan is commercial, but if you've already got it .... Check http://www.hamwick.com.



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