We had a very lively Q&A at our July meeting. 29 folks signed in, membership was up, and there were several old familiar faces in the crowd that we hadn’t seen for a while.

After whipping through the business part of the meeting, we started early, and just kept going. Among the questions was one raised by Betty Davis. She was having trouble emailing photos uploaded from her Kodak digital camera using Kodak software for the transfer and Outlook Express to send the email. Seems Kodak got a grip on the files and wouldn’t turn them loose, even though everything appeared normal in Outlook Express. She finally zeroed in on a work-around by going into Windows XP and changing the file association for the photo files. The question was, did we know a better way?

For Betty, no. For others, possibly. Betty’s camera has no memory card of any kind, so transfer must be directly from the camera, and the camera does not show up in Windows Explorer as an external drive when the USB connection is made. Unless there is a driver out there somewhere for her camera, Betty has probably found the best solution.

David Hinds also has a Kodak camera, but his has a memory card so he is able to use a third party USB card reader and Windows Explorer to transfer his photos from the camera to folders of his choosing. He has had trouble in the past attempting to email photos using Kodak’s software, but has had no problem using Mozilla.

I have had no problems of this type, but I never use Sony’s automatic transfer package, and never send emails using any of my image processing programs. I just make the USB connection and use Windows Explorer to drag and drop the photo files from the camera to the PC.

My suggestions for anyone having problems are:

* Get control of your file associations. Most image processing software allows you to set these either at the time of installation or later, but some just take charge whether you like it or not.

* Decide where you want to store your photo files, and set up the necessary folders for that purpose.

* Make the appropriate settings in your image transfer software or use Windows Explorer to make sure they get to the right location. If you can’t make it work, and your camera has removable memory, try using a third party card reader.

* Beware of initiating operations such as copying files from your camera or sending email from within your image processing software. More often than not this works well, but it can be a source of problems.

Our program for September will be by Ray Mattmann, of Telecomp, who will talk about the benefits of having your next personal computer custom built rather than buying it off the shelf. See you then.

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