Fixes sometimes (thank God) not too difficult

By Peter Vogel

Recently I had a spot of trouble with a folder full of pictures taken at my school’s commencement ceremonies. I’d taken 180 photos, spread across three media cards. These photos were downloaded from the cards into a common folder, and because they were taken on the same camera there was no possibility of common filenames. Besides, had there been two files with the same name there would have been a warning from the operating system (I was using XP) and an opportunity to overwrite or not.

Upon checking the folder a day later I was surprised to see various image thumbnails repeated, in apparently random locations. My first reaction was to think that something had gone awry in the copying process and that perhaps I hadn’t taken 180 shots after all.

My second thought was to recopy the files from the media cards, which in the interim had been erased. Erasing a media card and trying to subsequently recover data isn’t a big problem, as tools such as PC Inspector Smart Recovery (free, from www.pcinspector.de) are available, but the process takes some time.

That got me to thinking about the thumbnails I was actually seeing. Yes, there were apparently lots of duplicate images, but on closer inspection such pairs didn’t match in file size or in creation time. In short, the actual data files must have been fine.

Sure enough, double-clicking on paired files (to launch a picture viewer) showed that one thumbnail in each case did not match its photo file. In short, the thumbnails were corrupt, but not the data behind those thumbnails. Fortunately I hadn’t deleted any of the apparent duplicates.

A fix for the problem proved easy enough. I copied all the photo files (not the folder) to a new folder, checked that folder to verify that the problem didn’t exist there, deleted the original, problematic folder, and finally copied everything back to the location where I wanted it in the first place.

No more duplicates.

I imagine that this problem is a rare one. It seems that the XP operating system creates a thumbnails file for each pictures folder on a drive. That file can become corrupt, as it had done for me. Copying the picture files to a new folder forces the creation of a new, and hopefully clean, thumbnails file.

Let me also take this opportunity to remind you of a couple of my favourite image-file-managing packages if you don’t already have one of your own. Google’s Picasa www.google.com/picasa continues to draw a large following. The package is easy to use, offers a wide range of features, and of course, as are most Google products, it is free.

After a couple of years using Picasa I’ve found myself also using FastStone Image Viewer from Calgary company FastStone Soft. The free product is available from the company site www.faststone.org or from mega download site www.download.com, where the current version has been downloaded more than 2 million times. Image Viewer is a solid product that I use any time I have to run a public slide show.

Did you know?

Two out of three British web users lose significant portions of their time to irrelevant web browsing, a study by market survey firm YouGov has found. Workers confronted with the almost unlimited pool of online information become distracted and begin “wilfing,” short for “what was I looking for?”

According to the survey, surfing the web aimlessly seems to have become a national pastime in Britain, but there’s no reason to think such behaviour is isolated to the other side of the Atlantic. Hands up now, how many of you are wilfers at work?

If the results are to be believed, employers should be alarmed. It seems that workers can fritter away up to two full working days a month on random surfing.

A BBC interpretation of the survey notes that Scots are the top wilfers in the UK, with something like 60 per cent saying they were distracted some or all of the time while using the Internet on the job or for study purposes.

Topping the list of Internet sites likely to induce wilfing: shopping, news, and travel sites.

Perhaps something new to add to the Lenten renunciation list for next year: no more wilfing while working!

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.