Family Historian User Group

I can’t preview or load a previously ‘good’ picture (.tif) that has ‘saved as’ in Paint Shop Pro V7 or V9. The preview pane is blank white and the Multimedia right pane says ‘unable to load object”.

Note that this is not a problem with pictures saved as .jpg images.

I would have thought that this was a problem with PSP but for the fact that the 'saved as' tif picture can be opened in other applications eg MS PowerPoint.


ID:776

I haven't used the Multimedia features of FH very much but I have recently scanned a lot of family photographs as tif files for another reason and manipulated some of them with Paint Shop Pro. After seeing your posting, I tried to bring some of them into FH and found I had the same problem. It doesn't appear to be anything to do with PSP as some of scanned photos have never been near PSP.
I wonder if it has something to do with the type of compression used (or none). From PSP I normally select LZW compression. My scanner (HP 5300c) offers a compressed tif file format but doesn't inform me of the type of compression used.
I will try a few experiments.

Gerry,

In my case FH would accept an original tiff but would not accept a tiff that resulted from a 'save as' in PSP

David

David,

I believe the problem is related to the use of compression with tif files (or at least the LZW compression).
I found some of my tif files would open in FH and others would not. When I compared properties, all the ones that would not open were lzw compressed and the ones that did open were uncompressed.
I then opened a bitmap file in PSP and saved it twice; once with tif lzw compression and once without compression. FH could open the non-compressed version but again failed with the lzw version.
Could you see if you can repeat my findings?

LZW was until very recently a licensed compression routine requiring software which used to to pay a license. The graphics routines used by FH do not include the LZW compression routines.

I would suggest using png or low compresion jpg for images, or even not compressed tif

For what it's worth. I haven't tried using Tiff's but I import my images into FH as jpg's and if I want to export (save as) from FH I use bpm and have experienced no difficulties.

Gerry,

I've carried out some tests and you are quite correct in that LZ compression is causing the problem.

Tiff file from HP scanner - no problem in FH..
Same tiff file 'saved as' in PSP causes the problem due to 'Lempert Ziv compresion used by PSP during the save operation.

Thanks for your input.

David

I have just tried to insert a TIF image and got the message 'Unable to load image'. I didn't use LZW compression on any of my images. The problem seems to be that most of my TIF images have comments attached. I can only insert an image if it doesn't have a comment. Does anyone know if this is how FH is supposed to work? It would be a great nuisance if I have to save copies of all my photos either as TIFs without comments or as JPGs!

Annie, I have not seen that problem, is it possible for you to send me a small photo which has the problem, to janetaubman @ gmail.com and I will see if I can work out whats wrong and if not pass it on to Calico.