Using PhotoCDs -- Mac Photoshop

For several years, my route for digital photography was to shoot film,
have Boston Photo Imaging create a PhotoCD, and make this my primary
archive. Phil Greenspun's writing put me on this course, and it worked
well. I'm now shooting all digital, but I have lots of PhotoCDs.

Today, it's hard to get images from PhotoCD into Photoshop on a modern
Macintosh with Photoshop CS3.

Here's what I've found from Googling and my own experiments:
- There is a Photoshop CS3 plug-in but it only works on PPC Macs or in
Rosetta on an Intel Mac. Adobe says Kodak has stopped development and
support for PhotoCD.
- Switch PhotoShop to run in Rosetta. Very ugly.
- Graphic Converter 6.04 opens PhotoCD files, and is good for a
screen-based slide show. But, it mangles higher resolutions from
PhotoCD. Graphic Converter 4.5.4 does just fine on my PPC Mac, but I
haven't investigated further.
- Keep an older PPC Mac around for PhotoCD. Ugly.
- Keep an older version of Photoshop on your Intel Mac. Ugly.
- iPhoto will handle the PhotoCD, but seems to make you import ALL the
images on the CD. The full-res images as JPG are in /Pictures/iPhoto
Library/Originals and are about 6MB each, modest compression. The
quality seems pretty good. Select whatever images you want and
Export... as TIFF or JPG. The PhotoCD image number and the PCD ID are
unfortunately lost in the process. This approach works, and it's a
batch process, but still a bit ugly.

For one image at a time, I'll use Photoshop 7 on a PPC Mac. For batch
conversion, I think iPhoto is the best route. Anyone have additional
suggestions?

Shame on Kodak and Adobe for abandoning the PhotoCD format. Many of us
have a lot of images on PhotoCDs.

I think it's time to convert all our PhotoCDs to non-proprietary file
formats.

I hope we can count on our .psd files to be opened by future versions
of Photoshop!

-=- Rick

p.s. Mac OS X 10.5.3, Intel Mac, Photoshop CS3.

--
Richard Karash <Richard@xxxxxxxxxx>
Richard "at" Karash "dot" com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Burn is useless in iPhoto!
    ... Andy Hewitt wrote: ... I needed to send a hundred or so images to somebody on CD (I don't think ... and put the blank disk in as prompted. ... PhotoCD - giving the recipient different sizes to view. ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: Burn is useless in iPhoto!
    ... Chris Ridd wrote: ... I needed to send a hundred or so images to somebody on CD (I don't think ... and put the blank disk in as prompted. ... PhotoCD - giving the recipient different sizes to view. ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)