Back at the turn of the century there was file format in Kodak and other digital cameras that offered lossless compression. This format was essential back when cameras were one megapixel or less and any JPEG compression severely limited post processing capabilities.
At that time nearly all photo editing software supported this open standard file format but as camera resolutions increased FlashPix was dropped by manufacturers and the software vendors followed a little later. By the start of the last decade only a few programs supported the format and usually only in the 32 bit versions with plugins that needed to be installed and configured (hard to do for ordinary folks).
I thought I had converted everything I’d ever need back when PaintShop Pro still supported FPX but I was wrong. A decade ago I found a handful of photos I’d taken to document experiments for my job. Searching around I found My ViewPad a free image viewer that still works on modern Windows to view FlashPix files and convert them to many other file formats.
This morning I discovered 90 photos that had never been converted! Since there was such a large number of photos to convert I decided to try out some of the programs that were supposedly capable of doing batch conversion of FPX photos 10 years ago. Unfortunately none of those programs can open FPX files in 2021 (XnView/Convert & IfranView) :-(. So I’m going to have to convert these 90 photos one by one using the still great My ViewPad.
A final tip, when converting your FPX files save them in a lossless format to keep the quality as high as possible. The extra size on these low megapixel photos is insignificant by 21st century data storage standards. Probably the best choices are lossless PNG or TIFF because they are supported by every photo viewing/editing package I’ve tried.
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