I had planned to tell you about something great
....and you question was ?
regards, Richard
"mm" wrote in message
...
Much of this post is written for a win98 audience, but not all of it.
I had planned to tell you about something great, about software for
win98 that would soon disappear, so you should get it now.
But now I'm not sure what to say.
I'm talking about free photo arranging and editing software.
When developing film, I've been getting a copy put on CD, and this
would also apply to digital camera images.
I've been getting one roll done at as many different processors as
possible. Kodak, Ritz Camera (is that only around here?), Walmart,
and any place else that seems to use a different processor, because
each processor has its own software on the CD.
More about the others later, but the Walmart CD, processing by Fujica,
seemed to be maybe the best and certainly the one with the most
interesting story.
It has a viewer on the CD which worked fine, and had in itself the
abiltiy to email photos, complete with photo compression, by a factor
of 10, to make uploading and downloading go more quickly**. This is
something my email program alone can't do.
And I haven't tried it yet, but it seems to be able to burn photos to
a CD too, and while one could do that with Nero etc. I think this will
turn out to be better integrated with the viewer. I can send the
software to anywho wants, but it's probably not necessary as you will
see below.
When closing the viewer, it then as promised gives one the opportunity
to install an editor, called the Photo Manager, which it says has the
ability to get out red eye, to adjust contrast, brigntess, color, and
something else. Normally I wouldn't bother, but there are occasional
pictures that really could use improvement, and if it works well and
is easy, maybe even more could.
So I do that and the software install gets all the way to the copy
files step, and when it is almost done, it stops, the progress bar
goes backwards, and it says it couldn't install, it has not left
anything in my system (except it turns out 3 files in the temp
directory, but that's not much) and to try again. Trying again and
again gives the same problem. When the progress bar reverses, in
small print very quickly it displays "rolling back actions"!
So I called the Walmart Photo Customer service, and they (the woman I
talked to asked someone else) didn't know the answers, knew about
printing pictures for customers but not about software. So I wrote
the email address given, and I think a computer read the email and
because I had made one passing reference to the Walmart Photo Center,
wrote back about that only. So I wrote again, spelling it Foto
Sentre, and this time I got an email that addressed the Photo Manager.
But what did it say? "We received your email and we no longer use the
photo manager, you can know upload your pictures straight from our
site."
The misspelling of "now" makes it seem that the email was written by a
real person, but otoh, I knew a cook in the WWII army who said that
for every 1000 powdered eggs, they would throw in one real egg shell
to make the soldiers think they were getting real eggs. I wouldn't
put it past corporations to put mistakes in computer-generated letters
to make them seem real (although the first email I got had no such
errors, and it was even more likely to be computer-generated.
But anyhow, they "no longer use the photo manager"!!! This despite
the fact that they include the software, separately from the viewer,
on the CD I got only 8 days earlier, and they have a win2000/XP
version available for download on the Walmart photo webpage!!! It
sounds like she's flat out lying to me, but in case she wasn't, I
didn't reply to her on this because fore the people with win2000/XP, I
want the software to be still available.
What they want me to do is to upload any picture I take to their
wegsite and to edit them there. A) Sometimes I go to my parents and
that's a great opportunity to do things I don't have time to do at
home, but they only have dial-up. My laptop isn't even set up for
dial-up and it it were, I don't want to spend hours downnloading and
uploading so that I can edit from the Walmart server. B) Sometiems I
go camping at various places in the woods, or I spend a day at the
beach. No internet there at all, but plenty of time to edit pictures
on my laptop. It is a self-centered power-grab for Walmart to take
away the software that worked on the customers' computers and replace
it with what only works from their server. (If they had never offered
the better software, I wouldn't know and wouldn't complain, but they
did, so I do.)
Failing in this course, I tried another: I had noted that when the
viewer started up, it said something like "Preclick Powered", so I
guessend and went to www.preclick.com and that has some good stuff.
First check out this page, for all of their software and their
cooperative software, written for a particular customer:
http://www.preclick.com/products/?PH...c0a3b41e57#ppd
For one thing, it has the preclick software which definitely works
under win98SE and is pretty useful. IPM; PhotoMovieMaker; Gold
(photo orgainizer. That's what I dl'd, installed, and like);Back; and
Wiki.
The HP co-branded stuff says it only works on win2000/XP/Vista.
But the Costco stuff doesn't say that.
http://www.preclick.com/demo/costco/
Either:
http://www.costcophotocenter.com/organizer/ which has for download:
***
http://preclick.com/builds/Costco/1....0.96Signed.exe
This version also reversed its installation like the Walmart version**
did! So could some Win98 guru try installing this and see if there is
some way I can get it to work for myself. I think you also will like
having it if you can get it to work.
**The win98 Walmart version isn't on the web, only on the CD that I
paid for when I got them to develop my film. I could send that to
anyone who wants, but the Costco version seem to have tbe same problem
and is probably similar in function.
OR, one version newer it seems, but the same problem, rolling back
action:
***
http://www.preclick.com/releases/par...er1.4.0.97.exe
or the viewer, which includes the manager also, but which also rolls
back and won't install:
http://www.preclick.com/releases/par...er1.4.0.97.zip
The viewer, however, is the same or almost the same as the Walmart
Viewer, except for the logos.
Costco is far away from me, requires a 50 dollar "membership", and
sells in bulk that I can never use. And they don't say you have to be
a Costco member to download this stuff.
The Post-it stuff looks pretty good too, but I'm still trying to get
the earlier stuff to work.
The PhotoBackPack for U3 drives (flash drives) looks great, absolutely
great, and it might work great to show my pictures to my brother in
Dallas, who has XP. I already happen to have a 2 gig U3 drive,
(Sandisk, only 20 dollars at Best Buy, more elsewhere), and it came
with U3 software on it, but since I only have win98SE, I don't know if
I can or how to install it. *I didnt' understand what U3 was for
until I looked at this, and at www.u3.com
**I would think that the picture compression can be useful. While
one picture isn't much (3-500K, sometimes more) even uncompressed,
they mount up quickly if you want to send 10 or 30. With just 10, now
we're talking about 4 meg so getting it down to 400K total, even with
broadband, is helpful. And I sent a copy to myself and the quality
looks just as good as the original, at least with the kind of
snapshots I was taking.
I'm sorry this is so long, but I hope it is helpful.
Any help with the installation problem above will be greatly
appreciated***
If you are inclined to email me
for some reason, remove NOPSAM :-)
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