Cannot see images

Thought I’d share some interesting (?) information with you all. ‘Cos I know just how important these little tidbits are!!

After reformatting my new Sandisk 4GB SDHC in camera (K100D) and then copying some favourite images to it, I found that the camera didn’t see any images. ‘No Image’ came up on the screen when I tried to view them.

Well, I double-checked again on my PC, and sure, they were there.

So I re-formatted again and pasted the images again and they still didn’t appear on the camera viewer.

Blow me down, I thought…… or a very similar phrase..

Aha, I checked my other disks and they had a subfolder called 100PENTX.

I created this on the recently formatted card and copied the images into the subfolder.

Nada, nothing, nix, zilch. No images, again.

I re-formatted. Brainwave. I took a photo, viewed the image. Looked at the card with the PC and voila! 100PENTX subfolder created by taking a photo. I copied my 40 or so images into the subfolder and lo and behold…….. some of them appeared, not all. Some of the images just had a big question mark where the thumbnail should be.

I had renamed all images that didn’t have it with the correct IMGPxxxx format.

Any ideas as to why I should be getting question marks appearing and the message ‘Unable to read image’ ??

The camera isn't designed to read images other than those produced by the camera. The SD card should also be formatted in the camera you intend to use it in, and not on the PC. If I've understood you correctly you are trying to use the camera to view images from a PC, which is where the problem arises.

John,

Thanks for the info.

I had formatted the card in the camera. What I was trying to achieve is to use the camera to show some of the photos that I had taken with it. So I copied about 40 or so photos taken with the K100D from my PC archive back onto SD card. These are the original photos simply copied from SD card to PC and back again.

What I don't understand is why the camera should have any difficulty in reading an image that it saved to card originally, albeit copied to PC then back again. Could it be that altering the original image in any way, shape or form, could affect the camers's ability to subsequently read the file again?

I think that must be the case. These things can be quite sensitive - we have had cards that won't format in one K10D but will in another, for example.

Thinking about this, when you copied the images from the PC to the card they were no longer in the correct directory structure for the camera. So although the images might have been the same the way they were copied onto the card must have been different.

Hi Coriander, I was interested to read this topic as I have experienced similar problems. The culprit being a Lexmark Pro 4Gb 133x speed SDHC card, which plays 'hard to get' in my Pentax K200. I found that it will make selected images available for viewing, and withold others, offering the question mark instead. I've also tried it in my other (non Pentax) compact camera, with the same problematic results. It seems to hold onto the images only while the camera is switched on. Turn off the camera and all images are lost. This relatively expensive card is now gathering dust on a shelf, I shan't ever feel able to trust it. Sigh....

Sounds a bit like a faulty card, if it is still in warrantee, get a replacement.

Not a faulty card

This is a behaviour of the camera firmware - they expect to see the directory information in a very fixed format.

The binary information stored on the SD card for the directory has many different forms - the PC will use perhaps the most "complex" version, and the camera will write a simplistic version (that is compatible with the PC). The problem comes when the PC writes the files to the card and writes this "complex" directory structure that isn't recognised by the camera.

...at least that's as I understand it...


However, I did (somewhere) see a utility that would successfully write images back to the SD card for viewing in the camera. I'll see if I can find the URL again

Matt

I thought I would take my camera to a festive fancy dress party which was
held in what used to be a church. Bearing in mind i am still relatively new to the K20D behemoth I thought I would take some pics up on the first floor balcony at the assembled crowd gathered on the ground floor. I took several shots and viewed them. They were in TV mode( cant remember the logic of that normally I go for AV or SV). The photos were of half of one side of the hall in pinsize proportion. I think this was due to the fact that the setting was on spot metering from doing some potrait shots earlier.

back home in Photoshop I used the navigator to expand the images and at 30% plus normal faces of people could be seen. Can anyone offer me an explanation for pinhead size faces and what can I do to keep the images at 30%plus viewing. I did try saving the image at 40% magnification but when I viewed it later it had gone back to being pin head size.
I would like to add these shots were all at ISO 400 with good lighting on the photos, they were shot at F4 @ 1/6 , F4.5 @1/6 and F5.6 @1/6.

I copied some photos back from my laptop to the SD card. Once I remembered to put them into the appropiates subfolder, No problems. Could view photos and data on the K20D.
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