How do I use my Canon  Digital Camera as a playback device

I have a Canon PowerShot A410 still camera.  I like to use it not only
to take pictures, but also to show people picture I have taken.  It
has a nice LCD screen and can zoom into images when you are in
playback mode.

I want to show people photos I have scanned using my flatbed scanner,
by uploading them to my SD card using my PC. I have a SD card reader
on my PC and can mount the card as a removable drive.

When I tried this and put the card back in the camera it didn?t see the pictures.

I noticed that canon seems to have a particular file/folder naming
system and you have to upload them into that system for the camera to
recognize it. It isn?t enough to make small JPEGs and put them in the
right folder on the SD card.

The path is always:
M:\DCIM

The folder names have to something like:
105CANON

The file names have to something like:
IMG_0261.JPG

I want to know what the actual specs are. What is the magic formula
that is needed for folder names and file name for the camera to see
it.  I am sure someone else has tried to do this and figured all this
out already.

Thanx in advnce

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Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 23 Jun 2006 02:14 PDT

Hi sherpaj,

Let me know if this helps:

"INCOMPATIBLE JPEG FORMAT: When you alter photos with your photo
editing software you lose the photo camera settings (another reason to
keep the original photo). Your camera will not preview these on the
LCD screen, but will display them on TV. One exception (that I know
of). The Canon cameras evidently use JPEG 2000, which Adobe Photoshop
doesn't recognize. So I take my photos from my Canon camera,
previously edited with the preferred Adobe software, and load into
Broderbund's PhotoShop PhotoPro, then resave at quality level 7. Then
upload to the memory card via the card reader."
http://thebirdguide.com/digiscoping/technique.htm


Someone else used IrfanView:
"After some research, I found out that Canon uses a JPEG 2000 format
(or J2), which Photoshop doesn't support. All I had to do was open the
modified original in IrfanView (a freeware program) and save it.
Irfanview supports JPEG 2000 format."
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-4862.html

Best regards,
Rainbow

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Clarification of Question by sherpaj-ga on 27 Jun 2006 17:56 PDT

That almost answering my question.  I just need to know the naming
convention.  My camera will show the images, but only if i name after
an exiting image and put it in that folder.  i am wondering how to
make new folders and what the naming convention is so i can batch
rename a chunk of photos with my acdsee program.

To my knowledge the camera uses a 10XCANON naming system for folders
(X can be replaced with anything. Possibly, the middle digit can be
anything as well, though I'm not sure about that). The pictures use a
IMG_XXXX.JPG naming system. First picture taken gets the name
IMG_0001.JPG, the 14th gets IMG_0014.JPG et cetera.

Several, if not all, of the cameras do seem to track the number of
pictures already taken, so that if you've taken 250 pictures and
delete the last 50 it will still give the next picture you take the
name IMG_0251.JPG. Due to this keeping track of number of photos
taken-behaviour it might be possible that it won't read any file with
a higher number than the number of pictures taken. I've never done any
experimentation on this though, so don't assume that it won't accept
these pictures until you've tried yourself.

Anyway, the short answer would be that you need a 10XCANON folder (you
might as well use the already existing folder(s) since those are
guaranteed to work) and use IMG_XXXX.JPG for the pictures.

My recollection of the Canon software was that there was a provision
for "uploading" to a camera.  You might want to see if that's the case
(it's been a long time, so my memory may be foggy.)