Mac to PC: I want to avoid the tiff decompressor error

May 16, 2005 6:09 PM

Mac to PC: How do I avoid having images replaced with the error message "Quick time and a tiff decompressor are needed to view image"?

So a grad student was suposed to present some data during our group meeting, I loaded the powerpoint on my PC but got the tiff decompressor message instead of the graphics. Someone else in the room had a Mac laptop, but didn't have the adaptor for the projector. Poor guy had to draw on the board. Is there anything that can be done to solve this? I googled around some and the most common cure was to open the offending image on a mac with the original program and choose don't compress in some option box. Is there anything to be done after the fact (a PC program) or a way to set a Mac to never use Quicktime tiff compression?

posted by 445supermag to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Can't you install QuickTime for Windows?
posted by AlexReynolds at 6:49 PM on May 16, 2005

get photoshop? I've never heard of this problem, but I know photoshop can open compressed tifs.
posted by shmegegge at 8:10 PM on May 16, 2005

Oh man. I run into this all the time (not me - people around me).

<insert ranting expletive ridden ... rant>

When you're making your slides/word-documents/&c - you don't want to cut&paste your graphic into your program. DO NOT TO THAT. The worst culprit is graphs from mac excel documents into mac word/powerpoint. What you want to do is copy the graph into an image program like photoshop or paintshop pro (I haven't tried the packaged image program that comes with osx but I'd bet it'd work) and then save to a JPG file.

You need to format -->insert-->image-from-file into your documents (assuming MS Word/Powerpoint ).

That.Is.All.There.Is.To.It.

I've had so many Mac zealots blame it on that PCs don't support tiffs or that PCs suck or that... blahblahblah BS. If you conver the picture into a tiff (compressed, raw, lzh compressed, whatever) it'll still work fine.

/sorry - just a teensy bit bitter
posted by PurplePorpoise at 9:14 PM on May 16, 2005

PurplePorpoise has hit on what is probably the problem (and a peeve of mine, as well...though in my case, it seems to be the PC users in my office who can't grasp the concept of insert>image>from file)
That said, I create tiffs from my Mac for use in PowerPoint, Word, etc (PC) with no problems...once the user catches on to the love that is "insert>image>from file".
posted by Thorzdad at 5:35 AM on May 17, 2005

To be more specific, it sounds like whatever program placed the graphics on the clipboard - or perhaps the program that originally created the graphics - used QuickTime for its TIFF handling since QuickTime has that built-in. QuickTime, in turn, compressed the TIFF to save space, and the PC in question didn't have QuickTime installed and couldn't decompress it.

That gives you several solutions:

1. Don't use TIFF files if you don't know who is compressing them. Use a different lossless format, like PNG, or something like BMP that Windows likes.
2. Install QuickTime on the presentation system as well, though that's hard to arrange on-the-fly. Systems that have iTunes for Windows should also have QuickTime, so it's more common these days.
3. Export your presentation to a universal format like PDF that displays the same regardless of the presentation program. Even if PowerPoint correctly displayed the images, you could have trouble with fonts or other elements.

I don't know which solution is best for your situation, but one of them should be.
posted by mdeatherage at 9:10 AM on May 17, 2005

mdeathrage: surprisingly, neither of your first two remedies works. It seems that Photoshop in particular defaults to TIFF when copying and pasting, and that OS X wraps this in quicktime. Yes, saving out the file as jpeg or something usually works OK, but it's a pain in the ass, especially when
you just wanted to crop an image a bit or something. As to the second, having QT on the windows end doesn't help at all. Go fig. The third works if you can do without transitions or further editing to the document, but it's really a stopgap.

This is one of the nastiest surprises that using a mac can lay on you, as it's completely silent until you get back to a PC and run through the document- like, for example, the PC that is hooked up to the projector on which your yes-this-will-be-graded presentation is to run. Keynote doesn't seem to suffer from this problem, but once you have messed up a presentation in Office- by, for example, doing a few last-minute touch-ups to your presentation's graphics on a Mac- there's no way to convince Keynote, Office, or anything else I've seen to produce a PC-compatible version of the file without some kind of complicated exporting and reimporting of each image.

I'm not sure whether this is Apple's or Microsoft's fault, but if I had to guess I'd say... both? My petty revenge was to pirate Keynote for my laptop, making sure that neither party involved will profit off this outrage. In many ways this is a lot easier than the workarounds mentioned above, but still suboptimal.
posted by monocyte at 6:37 PM on May 17, 2005