We had a call from a lady who’d been given a photoframe for Christmas. She asked if we could scan some photos so she could see them on the frame, we went through the technical spec (jpg, dpi level) and she asked if we could do colour (yes), black and white (yes), both black & white and colour in the same batch (yes). And yes we would turn them all the right way round.
She had a very particular requirement, that the photos (of a cruise around the baltic states) appeared in the right order. We explained we could do that. A few days later the photos arrived, neatly labelled with Post-it notes and tied in a bundle with elastic bands. We took great care to scan the photos in exactly that order, put them onto a USB drive and sent them back.
The client rang to say she was happy, but you could hear the but in her voice. The but being the photos looked great but didn’t show in the desired order. Why?
I have a Philips photoframe and that can be set to show images in a random order. We talked on the phone and established that wasn’t the problem. There followed a couple of days of head scratching, lots of trials and a frustrating number of false dawns. Then we managed to find the solution.
We had scanned the photos in the right order, and numbered them accordingly. But our system generates a long file name. When we truncated the file names down to two digits the photos popped up in the right order. And we’d learnt a lot more about photoframes.
