Erlend Thune

Sivilingeniør Erlend Thune

The summer 2004, I purchased a HPR707 digital camera. One of the reasons I bought this camera was that it uses MMC memory cards to store pictures. That is what my Nokia N-Gage mobile phone uses too, and my plan was to be able to send pictures from my mobile phone by putting the MMC card from the camera into the phone. Even though I did all kinds of research before purchasing the camera, it turned out that it was not possible to open the images on the Nokia phone, at least not with the builtin image application.

After a lot of searching on the internet, I reasoned that the problem had to do with the EXIF format, which is the fileheader used to store photos taken on digital cameras. As can be seen on the EXIF organisations home page, HP has not submitted any sample images. Furthermore, I was able to display all the photos submitted by the other vendors on the EXIF home page. The problem turned out to be in the EXIF extensions which vendors are allowed to make. HP had added quite a few of those, and chances are that the Nokia programmers did not expect more than a few of these.

This was a good opportunity to get to make a program in Symbian. The result was the thumbnail extractor (available on request). The program scans the memory card in the Symbian device for all jpeg images. You can then extract the thumbnail image in it, and it will be stored on the card with a thumb suffix added. The size of the image makes it suitable for sending in MMS for example.