Opening .mip files in OSX

September 4, 2007 12:41 AM

[Mac OSX] I've been sent a couple of files as attachments. They're scans of documents but they're in .mip format. How can I open them?

I need to view the images inside and extract/save one to .jpg.

posted by mtonks to computers & internet (6 comments total)

With Paint Shop Pro?
posted by dance at 12:49 AM on September 4, 2007

Paint Shop Pro is not an OS X application, but would run under Windows within a Parallels/Fusion/BootCamp arrangement.

It looks like you may need to look into that, or have someone convert the file for you on a Windows workstation, as the usual Swiss army knife of image converters on Mac OS X (Graphic Converter) does not read MIP files.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:00 AM on September 4, 2007

Yeah, I'm pretty sure .mip is an internal (Windows) DirectX format, mainly used for images/textures that need to be scaled - it contains multiple copies of the same image, each 1/2 the size of the previous one, so that intermediate images can be interpolated. Think old-school 3D FPS games, and the way the wall textures used to flick between sharp and blurry as you moved around.

Never seen it used as a general image format though; I'd guess someone's got cheap and crappy scanner software that just uses DirectX routines to dump a memory region to disk. As such, you might be stuck with using something Windows-based to read/convert it, though there might be Linux tools/libraries that could be recompiled on OS X.
posted by Pinback at 2:18 AM on September 4, 2007

www.filext.com

MIP = "Paint Shop Pro Multiple Image Print File"
posted by intermod at 4:28 AM on September 4, 2007

Your best bet is to request the sender supply the scans in an "industry-standard image file format" like jpeg, tif, gif...heck, even bmp.

Be sure to include the "industry standard" part in your request.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:31 AM on September 4, 2007

Thanks everyone. I was hoping there would be some little app to let me view them but I've asked the sender for the actual .jpg files instead.
posted by mtonks at 7:26 AM on September 4, 2007