Rotating woes.

May 16, 2007 9:04 AM

Why won't my scanned photos show up in those lcd photo frames?

For mothers day we purchased 2 of those typical photo frames that rotate images from a memory card or internal memory. Roughly 300 scanned images were saved on the card along with a handful of more recent photos taken with my digital camera. On all of the frames we tried out, only the photos taken with the camera were displayed in the frames. The frames ranged from the cheapest no-name-brands that WalMart sold to the more expensive big label ones at Best Buy.

At least one frame claimed that the scanned photos were an invalid format, and all of them would display them as thumbnails but not the full-size image.

So now I've got a huge amount of scanned family photos, and no frame that will display them. Any ideas on how I can get these photos to display so that my mother can get a decent birthday gift next week? Is it a matter of EXIF info?

posted by chickygrrl to technology (11 comments total)

What format are the images in? JPEG? What's the file extension - JPG or JPEG?

Try loading the images in, say, Irfanview (it has a batch convert mode), and saving them again (use new filenames).
posted by Leon at 9:12 AM on May 16, 2007

The scanned images were .jpg. All had been saved individually in Photoshop, all filenames and extensions were lowercase, alpha-numeric and had no special characters. The photos from the digi-cam had also been modified in photoshop (cropping/color adjustments) and still displayed without any problems.
posted by chickygrrl at 9:22 AM on May 16, 2007

chickygrrl,

I know you stated what the file extensions are for scanned images but what are the file extensions for the digital pictures? What size are the digital images as compared to the scanned images? Do you know what resolution you are scanning at? There could be a couple things to look at, such as the resolution it may require a certain resolution to display (similar to computer monitors). I would try making them as much like your digital images as possible (size, file extension, resolution, etc.
I would also suggest possible trying another scanner as a test.
posted by lutzla23 at 9:43 AM on May 16, 2007

Maybe link to an example of the bad scanned one, so people can dig around inside.
posted by smackfu at 9:47 AM on May 16, 2007

Were the files saved to the card from a windows system or a mac?

A recent thread on a mac listserve seems to address a similar problem.

The recommendations are to use Optipix or BlueHarvest.

I don't have experience with either of these, but just passing along the info.
posted by nightwood at 9:51 AM on May 16, 2007

Make sure they are RGB .jpgs not CMYK .jpgs.
posted by jamaro at 11:08 AM on May 16, 2007

One digital photo frame I've used couldn't display images above 2 MP. Is it possible the photos you're attempting to view are too large?
posted by emelenjr at 11:10 AM on May 16, 2007

Is it possibly aspect ratio related? I wonder if the frames will only display very specific aspect ratio photos, which scanned photos will often not match.
posted by Nodecam at 11:10 AM on May 16, 2007

If you saved from Photoshop using File > Save As..., you may have embedded a profile or preview image that is throwing off the frame's tiny little mind. Try Save for Web instead.
posted by kindall at 12:38 PM on May 16, 2007

This is maybe not the case, but I remember an old scanner my father had used to scan the images in at MAMMOTH proportions. If the frame is unable to display at large resolutions or, maybe, is displaying just the black edges of an image, that could be your problem.
posted by GilloD at 6:07 PM on May 16, 2007

Alrighty, let's see if I can get all the answers here.

All of the images, digi-cam and scanned, are saved in .jpg at 72dpi on WinXP. They were saved via Photoshop's "Save For Web" option and are definitely RGB. A scanned image can be found here, and one from the digital camera is here.

In considered aspect ration and managed to convert most of the scanned images to 4:3, but those still wouldn't display. I don't think it's an issue with the sizes, since the digital photos are much larger than the scans and those are the only ones that actually will display properly.
posted by chickygrrl at 7:04 PM on May 16, 2007