How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

re: How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

James ONeill — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:54:18 GMT

I might try to get people to contribute a list of what works and what doesn't, but I want to hook up with the Microsoft people who talk to camera makers to see if we can do a better job of explaining why these things matter... Saying to them "If you implement <X> Windows will give your customers a great experience of <Y>, and third party stuff which does <y> better than Windows will work with your camera as well". They really don't seem to get it. How many camera vendors provide picture organizing tools which do the job less well than Live-Photogallery or even Vista's Explorer/Search combination ... but only do half the job with codecs.

Pentax did "Remote assistant" for the previous models but they have said they don't plan to update it for the K7. Remote assistant doesn't work on 64 bit (although I've got a demo of it working using the new XP mode on Windows 7).

I'll see what the shell people say. The shell copes with office documents where some properties are read only (word count) and some are read/write, so it should be possible for images as well.

re: How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

Axel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:33:14 GMT

Sorry to learn about the K7. Few cameras actually supports MTP/PTP for shooting. Nikons work fine but I had mixed feedback from Canon users, for example. What you can do is use the manufacturer's tethering software (assuming it works on your platform...) and watch the incoming folder with FastPictureViewer using it's tracking mode (T). The end-result is about the same as with the built-in MTP/PTP tethering.

Thanks for the post, by the way, and for considering to report the issue to the shell team. I'm not sure of all implications but it seems that they could try to get the writer upfront, on the other hand there is maybe something that prevents them to do that. With my codecs it would fail without harm because there is no encoder at all, but with others perhaps this would open the file for writing? Anyway I fully agree with your observation: the UI should be disabled when metadata cannot be written.

Cheers,

Axel

re: How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

James ONeill — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:06:36 GMT

Axel, I'll look at filing a bug for this internally, hopefully that will lead to the necessary change in the shell.

By the way the Pentax K7 doesn't support the commands for tethered shooting :-(

re: How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

Axel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:28:29 GMT

>“For this format the meta data is read only”

This is actually a shell issue. It would be trivial to check for the existence of a metadata encoder and disable metadata editing if none is found, for example by calling IWICComponentFactory::CreateMetadataWriterFromReader() and IWICImagingFactory::CreateFastMetadataEncoderFromDecoder(). If both calls fail, disable the editing interface.

Cheers,

Axel