Truncated Filenames from Windows?

[Anne Keller-Smith]

Hi,

I got a CD from a friend who took digital photos at my son's birthday party.

I noticed when I put it into my Mac that the filenames are all truncated to
the 8+3 format - you know, the old DOS short filename format? They
looked like this: SAMSMI~3.JPG

I am sure my friend didn't name them this way.

Since newer versions of Windows don't use the short filename convention
anymore, why is this happening? Any thoughts? I am pretty sure they
are running Windows 2000 or XP on that machine.

I copied the files to my hard drive, renamed them, did a batch re-export
in Macromedia Fireworks to reduce their huge size from about 1.5MB each
to about 60K each (with no loss of quality BTW), and I have a nice slide
show.

A side issue: why on my G4 Mac with 733mHz, 383MB RAM (270MB
unused), and lots of HD space, would the original 1.5MB photos freeze
Image Viewer? It got locked up completely. The rest of the Mac ran
fine, but I did eventually reboot because I couldn't get the stupid thing
to force quit. I think the utility is called Image Viewer on the Mac -
it's what tends to come up if you double click on an image from
someone else (as opposed to one I made myself in Photoshop or
Fireworks or something).

Also, my old slide show program, Quickshow Lite, choked on the
large images too, but I assume that's because it's so old it's not
expecting such large files. Works fine with the reduced versions.

<wink> The reduced files still fill my entire screen. And ... they're
all rightside up as opposed to on my friend's computer where half
the photos need to be rotated. Quickshow evidently rotates photos
so they're oriented properly, regardless of how you took them,
horizontally or vertically.</wink>

Anne Keller Smith, Webdesign
mailto:earthpigz at earthlink.net     http://www.earthpigz.com
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