Okay this just gets worse as time goes by.
I was just going to drop it and let things go, but today I finally discovered two straws that broke the camel's back, chainsawed it into little pieces, and displayed the corpse around the country on pikes to be a lesson to anyone who would dare purchase anything from Kodak.
Since the weather warmed up today, my wife and I took a walk with our camera. We took a few photos and she even filmed a couple short videos. Then when we got home she excitedly told me to get the pictures and videos off the camera so she could see them. So I opened up Picasa and went to the import screen and waited for everything to load up. For some reason it was taking a very long time for all the pictures and videos to display on the import screen (can't get them off until all files have been loaded) so as they would load one by one I'd look at them.
That's when I noticed that many of the videos my wife had taken over the past several months had strange purple lines through them. After watching several of them, the pattern seems to be that any video taken where there is any possibility of a sunlight glare results in big purple/pink discoloration across most of the image. So the videos are still broken after all!
I never noticed this before because I don't use the camera except an occasional photo. The odd thing is that photos all look fine, but videos have the discoloration with sunlight.
That made me mad enough to consider the camel's back broken, but in the meantime, and quite coincidentally, I've been backing up my wife's laptop so I can format it and get all the crap off of it that slows it down. She told me I'd better not delete her "Kodak" photos, to which I merely gave her a look with the accompanying thought of "Why would I do that? I'm sure they'll all be in the My Pictures folder anyway."
So I backed up her music and files and other documents. I looked through her Program Files directories, specifically with the intent of finding any photos that got saved into the Kodak folder. There were no photos to be found, so I was about to call it good and start copying the files over to another computer so I could format when I noticed her desktop picture (a nice, handsome photo of yours truly
) and I wanted to make sure I had that one backed up, too. So I went into the directories of photos I backed up and selected View as Thumbnails, looking for it. That's when I noticed that
all of her "Kodak" photos were actually shortcuts to the real images.
The problem is, the shortcuts didn't take me to the real images. They couldn't be found. I looked in My Pictures, I looked in Documents and Settings folders for every user on the machine. I looked everywhere I could think of. I couldn't find them anywhere. I was wondering, if they weren't on the computer anymore, why would the shortcuts show the actual photos when in thumbnail mode.
As a last resort I opened up the Kodak EasyShare software, and I saw tons and tons of photos and photo albums. None of which I had backed up. But where were they hiding? The stupid program wouldn't let me find their directory. Finally, the horror of the mistake that almost was dawned on me: Hidden folders.
I'm a power user, so I always have it so I can see hidden folders, but I thought it best if my wife didn't see the contents of hidden folders, the Program Files and Windows directories. I enabled them and of all the unhidden folders in the Program Files\Kodak directory,
the only one that was hidden was the one which contained the original photos! And it was actually hidden inside the innocent looking "bin" directory, where no average user would think to look anyway!
As a result, we almost lost 170 original family photos spanning more than the entire length of our life together, including our wedding photos! I'm not even sure how the wedding photos (or others) got in there since they were taken before we even got this camera. I guess Kodak software decided to assimilate any photo it found on the system.
My experience with Kodak has just been one nightmare after another.
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