The death of PhotoCD, part II

Yesterday I was describing the virtues of the Kodak PhotoCD system. Among them were the discs themselves, made with a one-atom-thick layer of real gold, which according to Kodak, ensured a long life and resistance to decay, corrosion and data loss. But, nothing they made ever guaranteed that the software necessary to read a PhotoCD Image Pac would be supported forever.

Last Thursday I got a call from a client at the Dept. of the Interior. He needed a panoramic photo made from a series of PhotoCD images, which he sent to me via YouSendIt. I accepted the job (I had done this hundreds of times). By mid-afternoon Friday I finally got started on the project; I unzipped the document he had sent me, and it revealed 18 PhotoCD Image Pacs. The scanning had been done at a lab in San Francisco from original 35mm film, and the Image Pacs were of the five-resolution variety.

The final Professional Kodak PhotoCD system consisted of a very nice medium-format scanner, a computer, a 35mm scanner, and a desktop dye-sublimation printer.
This illustration is from an article I wrote in 1997 to promote the product for Eastman Kodak Company.

We’ve all been down some sort of rabbit-hole like this, but this one has now gone for several days. I tried to open the Image Pacs in Adobe Photoshop CS3. It indicated that it does not support that file type. I remembered that PhotoCD was supported in a previous Photoshop, so I opened CS2, which I still have on my machine. It would also not open them.

I went to the Adobe CS3 installer discs, and opened the Content disc, which has additional software on it. Among the Goodies on that disk is a goody called Optional Plug-ins which contains a plug-in called Kodak PhotoCD. Terrific! I followed the instructions on the ReadMe file (an amazing accomplishment in itself) and installed the optional Kodak PhotoCD plug-in for Photoshop CS3. Then I restarted Photoshop and received an error message that one of my plug-ins had not loaded. Guess which one!

The error message said that more information could be found in the System Info file under Help. I read this entire file, which lists all of the plug-ins that are loaded into Photoshop, and at the very end was a message that said “The plug-in: Kodak PhotoCD was not loaded.” That was really helpful! So I went back to the plug-in itself and hit Command-I to get information about the plug-in. That proved to be more revealing: the name of the plug-in was “PhotoCD.plugin,” but the description of the plug-in is “PhotoCD plug-in (Power PC).”

Now I knew why the plug-in had not loaded. My Macintosh is an Intel machine. I no longer have any Power PC Macs around. So, I figured that I would search the web for an update. Go the the source!! I went to Kodak’s web site, and searched for PhotoCD. I foud the plug-in I had, and a variety of other software, but nothing for Intel Macs. In fact the most recent document was dated 1997. Trouble.

I tried the new Photoshop CS4, and it won’t read PhotoCD Image Pacs either. When I visited the “plug-in source” at Adobe.com, and looked up File Formats for CS4 (shipped in October, just one month ago) the PhotoCD plug-in is listed, and when you click on it, it goes to the same 1997 Kodak PhotoCD web page. There is no new software to support PhotoCD in Photoshop (why does Adobe link CS4 to a furloughed web site?). I was dead in the water.

In the middle of Day Two, I thought I would try Graphic Converter, a handy shareware product from Lemke Software that can open all sorts of image files. I was buoyed when I was presented with the dialog box where you choose which of the five image resolutions you want to open from an Image Pac. I was on my way! So, I opened one at full resolution, and I was greeted by a green rectangle of the correct resolution. It was useless.

I decided to sleep on it, and finish on Sunday (the photo did not have to ship until Monday). Sleep helped. In the middle of the night my brain’s conflict-resolution center solved the problem: we have about 20 Power PC Macintoshes at Cal Poly. I got up at 5:00 and drove (I usually cycle) to school in the dark. I took the optional plug-ins disc and the PhotoCD Image Pacs. It took about five minutes to install the PhotoCD plug-in on one of the G5 computers at school, and suddenly Photoshop CS3 was able to read and open the images in the PhotoCD Image Pacs. In minutes I had 18 full resolution images ready to go. That part of the problem was solved.

So, now I have a real problem: over the years I had more than 50 PhotoCD discs made of images that I took on film. Though I still have the film, the images on the discs are unreadable to me (unless I ride over to school and use the Macintosh G5). I am sure that I am not the only person who has PhotoCD discs. What do we do to read these files in the future?

I thought about taking a hard drive and all of my PhotoCD discs over to school, and then writing an Action in Photoshop to open every image on every disc. The Action would convert all of these images to Photoshop format, and save them to a hard disk. That would would solve the problem. But I have over 5,000 images to transfer, and this does not sound like fun at all.

I am thinking of the promises made by companies like Eastman Kodak (among others). The promise was that PhotoCD discs would last an indefinite amount of time (Kodak salespeople used to tout “100 years or longer” though it was never official). Nobody ever said the software warranty would run out in 1997, or upon the arrival of an Intel-based Macintosh (whichever came first).

I am concerned about file formats, storage technologies and other effects of our digital lifestyle. I have already abandoned optical disc drives (after transferring the data to DVDs), ZIP drives (same), SyQuest drives (same) and others. I suppose the PhotoCD issue should not surprise me; it’s just another technology that falls into obsolescence.

It is not Kodak’s responsibility to maintain software forever. It is my responsibility to remain vigilant, and to copy digital files to new storage media when I get a hint that I am about to be abandoned.

It is also my right to be upset when I have a weekend like the one I just experienced.