Corrupt or lost photos on your camera's memory card...

I am a wedding photographer and I had the worst nightmare last night... 130 photos from the wedding I had shot yesterday were corrupt and they were the most important shots (the actual wedding itself as well as all the group shots). Fortunately the problem was swiftly resolved, in fact it was so easy I am not sure it is even worth this post!

Symptoms:

1. When I attempted to view the photos on the back of my Canon EOS 40D, it simply said: "cannot play back image".
2. When I attempted to view the photos using Adobe Bridge or open them in Adobe Photoshop CS3, I got the error message: "could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of document".

Soloution:

I simply installed the San Disk Recovery Pro software which came with my memory card and used that! I guess you can download similar programs for free if you Google for them?

POINT OF NOTE:

Prevention is better than cure... I am now going to buy a more expensive camera, which writes your photos to two memory cards at once. This will give me peace of mind, and I think that I owe this to my clients also.

Controlling iTunes with laptop media controls when iTunes is minimized

I have just got a Dell Laptop (XPS M1530) and was getting annoyed when I could control iTunes using my media controls only when it iTunes was active/maximised, but not when it was minimised. I had a look around and found a solution that worked:

1. Download a plugin file called mmKeys.dll from here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RT5KRWFY
2. Copy it into your iTunes plugin folder found at: C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunes Plug-in The file can be downloaded here:

You may need to make hidden folders visible to see Appdata and you will need to close iTunes before you do it. No need to restart afterwards, just open iTunes and enjoy being able to use your media controls properly!