Computer Problem - Saving Photos in Bitmap vs jpg Format

[arara123]

Can any Dopers more computer-savvy than I help me out.

In the past, when I would save photos from the internet I would "right-click" on the photo and select "save picture as..." The name of the photo would appear and it would be saved as a jpg file.

For the past week or so when I have tried this I can only save the picture as a bitmap file and the name of the picture to be saved is always "untitled." If I try to change the "save as type" in the lower part of the box that opens I am not able to; "bitmap" is the only option available.

I called my help-desk and they couldn't tell me what was going on, except to say that they did'nt think there was anyway I could have changed the options to make this happen.

This happens on various websites so I don't think it's because the picture is stored as a jpg or bitmap on the original website.

Even stranger, sometimes (for a few minutes) the format will go back to jpg - and then beck to bitmap.

I would rather save all pictures as jpg files, they're smaller and I don't have to type a name to replace "untitled" every time.

Any help would be appreciated -- Thanks.

[Lute Skywatcher]

IE or Netscape?

[arara123]

Internet Explorer, although when I saw your post I opened Netscape. With IE the picture saves as a bitmap (no other choice) but with Netscape it saves as a jpg.

I prefer IE to Netscape (it's what I know) so I rather solve the problem in IE than switch to Netscape.

(And I'm using Windows 2000, if that makes a difference.)

Thanks.

[Lute Skywatcher]

I know what you're going through. I recently downloaded a bunch of player pics from mlb.com with both Netscape and IE. I have Netscape 6 at home and 4.7 at work; for some odd reason 4.7 was easier to use for my purposes. I used IE at home, thinking it would be more helpful. Instead, I ended up with the same predicament as yours. For some strange reason, Microsquish thinks two choices for saving picures is just fine. More often than not, those two choices are bitmap or art. Sometimes I was able to save as a JPG, which is what I wanted. I have no idea why Microsquish does this or how to change it. Normally I don't bother saving pics with IE. This seems to be just an IE problem because I'm running 98.

[padabe]

I know what exactly what you mean. I'm not sure if this will help, but if you are getting to these pics through a link, instead of clicking the link, right-click it and pick "Save Target As..." Strictly treating the symptom, though.

If anyone can explain WHY this happens, I'd appreciate it as well.

[arara123]

Thanks to all so far.

Padabe, I don't have the "save target as" option when I right click (it's there, but not bolded - I can't click on it.) If I click on the photo to enlarge it and then chose "save as" from the tool bar it wants to save it as "untitled" bitmap image. (If I'm in a web page with more than one photo and click "save as" it saves the page as an html file.

Jeff Olsen, a couple of times this week my computer (while using IE) would revert back to saving pics in a jpg format - after a few minutes I was back to having pics saved as "untitled" bitmap as my only option.

I've had this computer for about six months and this is the first time this has happened, and I can't remember this happening with any of my previous computers. I wasn't messing around with any of the settings before this happened.

[richardb]

Although I don't know the answer to your question, I do have an idea for a "workaround."

As far as I know, when you download a picture by saving it to your hard drive, all you are doing, really, is copying the file. I do not believe IE is actually coverting the jpeg files you are trying to download into bitmaps, so what I would guess it is doing is just renaming the file from "original.jpg" to "original.bmp" or "untitled.bmp". The file should still be exactly the same, though, so you could either just change the extension on it after you've downloaded it, or just open it in in your picture editing software, which would recognize the file for whatever format it is in, rather than what its extension is. Note that this may mean opening the picture editing software first, then using it's "open" command to open the picture file, because double-clicking on the file itself may not work. This is because windows decides what program to run when you double-click on a file based on its extension, not based on what the file is (as a Mac does). So if the program associated with BMP files on your computer is not the same program as you would use to open a JPEG file, then it would run the wrong program (like MS Paint, possibly) if you just double-clicked on the file itself.

There may be more to this than I realize because I prefer Netscape to IE, but either one should just save the file as it's original name, whether "original.jpg" or "original.gif" without changing that. The original could not be any other format if it is a picture, because without plug-ins only JPEGs and GIFs are recognized by browsers.

One last thought triggered by that last paragraph: it could be that the "picture" you are trying to save may not actually be a "picture," but instead a Flash SWF file or a Director Shockwave movie, or a Quicktime or RealAudio file or some other kind of specialized plug-in supported file that merely looks like a picture. If this is the case, my experience has been that you would not have a "save image as" option at all, but maybe with some file types with IE it gives you the situation you described above. But if you are able to "save image as" properly with Netscape for those same pictures, then this is not the case.

Hopefully an IE expert who has run across this kind of error before will give you a better idea on how to fix it.

[Bob Scene]

Originally posted by richardb
As far as I know, when you download a picture by saving it to your hard drive, all you are doing, really, is copying the file. I do not believe IE is actually coverting the jpeg files you are trying to download into bitmaps, so what I would guess it is doing is just renaming the file from "original.jpg" to "original.bmp" or "untitled.bmp".

I've had this problem before and I've found, by looking at the source code of the web page, and opening the image file in Wordpad, that the pictures in question are actually starting out as JPGs (because the source code says <img src="whatever.jpg"> and are actually being saved as BMPs (because the file is largee and starts out with the string "BM.")

The only theory I've come up with to account for this is that Bill Gates personally programmed this "problem" into IE because he gets off on making his software do completely senseless, annoying and inexplicable things to piss off his users, and he can only have an orgasm by hearing or reading his users' angry complaints about such things. This is only a theory, but I think it explains the traits of Microsoft products pretty well.

I have an idea for a workaround, but I can't try it right now because the problem won't happen for me now. Anyway, you can try to right-click on the image, select Properties, and then select and copy the image location from the properties box (which should say something like "http://www.porn.com/dirty.jpg.") Paste that into the Address line and see if you don't get a JPG.