Digital Camera experts...I need help.

I’m having touble printing photos. Specifically getting them to even show up on the printing drive on the printer kiosk. I’ve been printing them here for a year and a half now.

The camera works fine…Canon PowershotA70. Takes the photos, you can look at them after taking them, you can look at them on the computer.

I’m trying to get the photos printed. I take them into a grocery store with these little photo kiosk things. Plug in your compact flash card, go thru the windows and it will find your directories and count how many photos you have available for printing. The problem is it finds one directory if there is one, but no photos.

I’m guessing I did something to the card, and this happens to all 3 cards I have now. Should I format the card(after moving the photos)?

When I look at them on the computer, the cf card looks like this on Windows Explorer:

-Removable Disk (E:)
…- Dcim
…116canon
…Canonmsc

In 116canon directory will be all my photos that seem fine.
In Canonmsc directory right now are 2 files, is:
… 116.ctg 7kb CTG file
… D.ctg 1Kb CTG File

  1. What are these CTG files?? I shouldn’t mess with them?
  2. Should I just format my card again? Didn’t seem to help, maybe it hurt?
  3. How can I print a photo?? What did i do wrong?

I will go to a professional place tomorrow, not expecting anything different, but what to get your opinions first.

Do not format the card using your computer whatever you do. That is bad, bad, bad and can make your card unusable in the camera.

Here is what I would do:

  1. Move the pictures to the computer.
  2. Manually delete all the folders and files on the card with your computer.
  3. Put the pictures back straight onto the card in no folder.

I am not sure what the problem is. Those machines however seem to scan the whole card for pictures. They will find the pictures if they aren’t in a directory at all. I put photos from my computer on blank cards and take them to get developed on it always works.

In addition, when you want to use the card in your camera again, just use your computer to delete everything on the card. The camera will create the directories its needs when you take the first picture.

Hmmm. Did you maybe change the format it’s saving the pictures in? Say – RAW or TIFF instead of JPEG?

The A70 supports neither of these formats.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what the problem could be.

Big Cheese,

After copying your image files to your computer, burn them to a CD and bring that to the store. It’ll probably read that. No compatibility issues or worries about the CF reader being broken.

Just our of curiousity, have you tried this card in another store’s photo machine?

Going to try another machine and store today.

The photos are .jpeg.

I did use a card that always worked last week. Took photos of my nephews bday party, so was surprised it was screwed up. The file directories in my first message are what they look like after the 5 photos or so I took.

I know one of the cards I probably did format on the computer, I’ve got 4-2 small 2 large. When I bought it Nov 2003 they gave me a free 16m card! How times have changed.

I have not found this to be the case with compact flash which functions logically as an IDE disk drive. I have used my CF reader on my computer for format cards for both my Nikon D100 and my Canon A70 with no ill results. I normally use FAT16 but the NIkon supports FAT32 so it can use cards bigger than 2GB. In all cases the cameras gladly put the special root directory files on and worked fine. This can be a problem with other types of flash memory where the controller is part of the device not the card.

I would suggest reformatting in the camera and trying again. I generally don’t use my cards to get photos printed as I always seem to do some post processing first. I actually do need to get some prints done today so I might try it.

No kidding, I just got a 2gb card for barely more than I paid for an 80mb card a few years ago.