Photos disappeared

[kaycarl]

I have a 4GB Fuze which I bought primarily for listening to audiobooks.  I did put some photos and a video on it and it worked fine.  I tried to look at the photos today, I got a black screen.  The player shows the files are there, but when I select a photo to view, I get the black screen.  I can see the files  in Windows Explorer when it is connected to the computer.  I tried deleting them and adding them again, but the same thing happened.  The video and audiobooks are working normally. 

I managed to solve the few problems I had when I first got the player by reading this forum, but I cannot find anything about this problem.  (I am not too computer literate)

[tenzip]

What format are they in?  What size (in pixels as well as kB) are they?  How big are the files?  Were you ever able to view them on the Fuze?

I suspect they are either in a format the Fuze doesn’t like, or the size is so big that the Fuze can’t get a handle on them.

[mags1230]

Also, did you use the sansa media converter or just drag and drop? And did it happen after updating to the lastest firmware?

[tenzip]

I don’t know it for a fact, but I believe the Sansa Media Converter is for videos, not still images.

I’ve never had any interest in putting anything but music on my little jukebox.

[gwk1967]

No, SMC is for pics too.

[tenzip]

OK, I stand corrected.  Thank you GWK.

[mags1230]

Yes, it’s for photos too.  What it did was to change my 559x288 11.4 kb jpeg photo into a 220x113 48.6kb bitmap one.  And it shrink a 1.13mb bitmap photo into 51.6kb bitmap.  That’s quite a change.  I never checked before, but it looks like bitmaps are the prefered format for the fuze.

Message Edited by mags1230 on 04-24-2009 09:21 PM

[kaycarl]

The photos (about 8 all togther ) were in jpeg format and I had viewed them until yesterday.  I had dragged and dropped them into the Fuze.  I  tried resizing the biggest one down to 43KB.  I tried using SMC to add just one photo,* but the file “failed to write”.  I tried dragging and dropping the resized picture and it “fails to copy.”

(I currently have an audiobook which is 216MB on the Fuze–could this be the problem?)

I hope this can be resolved–I found the Fuze a convenient way to show off grandchildren pictures.

Again, thanks for helping. 

[ewelot]

@mags1230 wrote:
Yes, it’s for photos too.  What it did was to change my 559x288 11.4 kb jpeg photo into a 220x113 48.6kb bitmap one.  And it shrink a 1.13mb bitmap photo into 51.6kb bitmap.  That’s quite a change.  I never checked before, but it looks like bitmaps are the prefered format for the fuze.
Message Edited by mags1230 on 04-24-2009 09:21 PM

Indeed, the Fuze seems to prefer bitmap files. Despite the fact that in the product specification there is nothing on bmp support, even the pre-loaded example images are in bmp format. But beware! It is a nowadays uncommon 16bit bitmap file format. It looks like this is what SMC is converting to, but I cannot check this because I am running Linux only.

Otherwise I didn’t have problems with non-interlaced JPEG images at least up to 1280x1024 pixel size.  

[ewelot]

@Kaycarl

Could you try to connect to your PC in MSC mode? Is there some disk space left? Can you copy an image into the PHOTO folder and check if this one is visible?

[kaycarl]

ewelot, I tried that and it didn’t work.  I finally tried deleting the Photo Folder from windows explorer and re-creating one and now it works.  I don’t fully understand why, but at least it works.  I don’t know why the pictures disappeared in the first place.

Thanks to all who tried to help