One of the more popular photofinishing services available is the picture disk. For an additional charge, you can have not only the photos and negatives developed and printed, but you can have them scanned to a floppy disk as well, which is the subject of this page.
Picture disks are available at any retailer (grocery store, drug store, etc.) that uses Kodak's photofinishing services. The diskettes contain viewing software for Windows systems. (I heard some other laboratories offer a similar service, but not in the area where I live.)
The photographs on the picture disk are JPEG files. Each image on the original negatives has two corresponding files on the disk. The JPEG file contains a 600 x 400 scanned image of the actual photograph. The TMB file is a thumbnail represenatation of the photograph. The thumbnail is also in JPEG format and can be processed the same as other JPEG files.
Image files are named as follows: II_NNX.JPG for the 640 x 400 image files and II_NNX.TMB for the thumbnails.
Where II is the image number on the picture disk, NNX is the image number on the original negative. The X shows an A if the image on the negative is centered around the A in that negative.
How do I order a Picture Disk?
The next time you take a roll of film in for developing, select a photofinisher that offers a picture disk service. Fuji does not offer that service just yet. (I inquired about it at my local Wal-Mart, which sends some of its film to a Fuji lab.)
The following is a list of some places known to offer the service.
Wherever you go to have the service done, make sure you clearly indicate that you want the picture disk or the picture CD service.
Kodak also offers a service where you can view and download your pictures off the Internet. With this service, you get not only your pictures and negatives back, but an access code and password where you can retrieve your photographs.
The Picture CD service Kodak offers for the consumer is not the same as the Photo CD service offered in many camera stores. The images are stored in the Photo CD format (files have the .PCD extension) on the Photo CD service. The images on the Picture CD for the consumer market are stored as JPEG files. PCD files are not supported by the major web browsers, nor are they supported by GIMP, Word Perfect 8 or StarOffice.
How do I access the images off the disks
If you have ordered the Picture Disk, you can use the image viewing utility that comes with the Picture disk. This is a Windows 3.x application, and therefore, you can install and run it in any Win-OS/2 session.
To install the utility, simply insert the Picture Disk, open a Win-OS/2 session, then select File -> Run, and then type A:INSTALL.EXE and press Return.
Alternately, you can open a command line window, either OS/2 or DOS, and then chdir to an empty directory and type in COPY A:*.JPG to copy the JPEG files.
If you have ordered the Picture CD, you must copy the images off the CD by issuing the following command in a command line window and in a blank directory:
