PS CS3: "could not complete your request because of a program error"

Question

Hi,
I am using Photoshop CS3 on Windows XP Pro (Upgraded from PS v7.0 a few months ago) on about 10% of my images I'm getting an the error:
"could not complete your request because of a program error"
when trying to save the file after doing changes to it. Oddly enough I do NOT get the error when doing "Save As" even after the recieving the error on a save. Nor do I get the error if I open one of the affected files in PS v7.
I believe from searching on line that the problem is "something to do" with the format of the metadata in the images. I am not sure exactly what, nor am I sure why it only affects about 10% of my images - all of which have been processed, captioned and keyworded the same way. However it is noticable that I cannot open "File info" dialog box in PS CS3 for any image that won't save. The error given is: "Could not complete the File Info command because of a problem with the File Info module"
Oddly, I CAN open the same File Info dialog box in Bridge CS3, I can change metadata via Bridge but then even after doing that the problems still exist when the image is opened in Photoshop.
At the moment, the ONLY work round I have is for each effected image, open it, do a "save as" - to save it under a different name delete the original image and then rename the image back to it's original name to ensure that my DAM can still locate the image.
I am a professional photographer with over 25,000 PSD files. As you can imagine it is impractical to manually open every image to see is affected. Can anyone think on any automated method to locate which images have the problem?
Does anyone have a fix to this problem? The workround above has one MAJOR drawback. Like most/all DAM users I locate and open my images from within my DAM (IMatch in my case). If I use the save-as/delete/rename method while the DAM is open I lose the data records associated with the image in the DAM. (The data is lost when the original image is deleted).
Any help would be appreciated. This is becoming a MAJOR problem for me.
Thanks,
Ian M Butterfield
www.imb.biz

Answer 1

Hi Rob,
I've uploaded one of the images to my server....
http://www.iphotos.co.uk/downloads/tmp/FA0309A-E02305.zip (30Mb download).
I wouldn't say that the "image" is corrupt - the "image" is fine and in fact "Save As" to a new filename corrects the problem altogether. What I would say is that PS CS3 isn't handling the metadata in some of my images correctly. I use a lot of different programs to view/edit/update both image and metadata. PS CS3 is ONLY program I have found that has any problem with the files.
I only have two makes of camera Canon 5D and 10D. I can't say for certain whether it affects 10D files as the vast majoity of images I'm working on are from my 5D. What I can say however that not all images from a given shoot with the 5D will be affected - only a small proportion of them.
Anyhow, please download the zip file and extract the PSD to a suitable location. Then open the image in PS CS3 from that location. Make a minor edit to the image and you will see that PS CS3 can't save the file. Quit. Open the image again and select "File | File Info" and you will see the other error message. If you open the file and do "save as" to a new filename and repeat the above step everything works as it should.
If this was just a single file that I was having problems with I'd put up with the work round of "Save as" to correct the problem. But with 25,000+ PSD files and at a guess a random 10% of my files being affected you can imagine how frustraiting this is.
Thanks,
Ian.