Photo Gurus Help!: iPhoto file Corruption from HP Digi. Cam

[MBHockey]

Long story short, I finally convinced my parents to get a Mac. So i picked up a Mac Mini for them today, and when we got it set up i hooked up my mom's digital camera to it.

It's a HP Photosmart M415. The pictures are in jpg format. So here's the issue. We hook up the camera, hit Import. There's about 70 pics on there, and it gets down to 30 something left, and it stalls. The import just hangs. So i say, give it time it'll go. But it doesn't...it's stuck there.

I stop the import, and try again with iPhoto. Again it stalls on the same picture. So i fired up Image Capture, and made it copy all the pictures to a folder on the desktop.

Now, the import went through fine (as in, all the pics are there), however, about half of them are corrupt. I tried opening them in Preview, Photoshop, and Graphic Converter, and none can open them.

So where iPhoto stalled was the first of the corrupt images. Picking one at a time in image capture seems to yield a somewhat better success rate, but it's not good. Also, sometimes i can open and view the picture in Preview, but i cannot import it into iPhoto...

Why can't iPhoto import a picture that Preview can open?? That is simply beyond me.

The same procedures were repeated, with the same results, on a Titanium PowerBook running 10.4.7 and an Intel Mac Mini running 10.4.7.

[MisterMe]

You contradict yourself. You say that the file that chokes iPhoto is corrupt. This should not be surprising. However, you go on to say that Preview can open the file. Which is it? Is the file corrupt or is it not?

[MBHockey]

Precisely the predicament...

There's three scenarios:

1) Picture opens fine in both Preview and iPhoto
2) Picture opens fine in Preview, but won't import into iPhoto
3) Picture opens in neither Preview, or get imported into iPhoto

2 and 3 seem happen MUCH more than 1. Sadly.

[MisterMe]

You description is a bit maddening. As best as I can surmise, you are talking about multiple pictureS rather than just one picTURE. An individual picture is either corrupt or it is not. As a test, you should try to download pictures from your camera to another computer or computers, both Mac and Windows. Again, based on your description, it appears that your camera outputs a large fraction of corrupt pictures. You may try a different storage card in your camera. If this doesn't fix the problem, then the camera itself may be the problem.