Photoshop file issues from Mac to PC
 

Here's something strange that I ran into last night working with my assistant on a whole bunch of photoshop files. She is running Photoshop 6 under Windows XP, I have Photoshop Elements 2 on Mac OSX 10.3. When I e-mail or upload my files to webspace she can download and open them without any problem. Her files open on my Mac this way also, and if she copies them to a USB flash drive I can open them without problem.

So last night I copied about 300 MB of files to a USB flash drive and she dragged them to her PC. All the files appear under Windows with Photoshop icons and double clicking them starts Photoshop under XP. But after Photoshop opens she gets an error message that the files are "not valid Photoshop files." We tried lots of things after that... formatted the flash drive for DOS under MacOS, then formatted it as FAT 32 using her PC. We tried browsing directly to the files within Photoshop to open them. Still no luck. Then I tried savinig the files as JPG and TIFF on the Mac. Still the same error. BTW, neither of our machines has any special software installed for transfering files between Macs and PC's.

Finally, I enabled SMB Windows file sharing on my Mac and she connected directly to it on our office LAN. The Mac volume mounted without problem so we dragged the same file folders directly to her PC. Now they all are properly recognized as Photoshop files and all is well.

Any clue as to what's going on here? Very strange...

Sounds to me like there is a problem with the flash drive. Since you could share those files over the LAN and they work fine, then there is nothing wrong with the files themselves as they sit on your Mac, and nothing wrong with PS on her end. Therefore it must be the trasnferring of the files. Esp. since it happens with jpg and tiff files as well.

Try copying a file (any file) from your mac onto the flash drive. Remove the flash drive. Re instert it and copy the file from the flash drive to a different dir on your mac and see if you can open it. Have her do the same w/ XP on her end.

Alex F