Unreadable Error Message While Transferring Photos

Question

Hi. Wonder if anyone can give me some ideas about what may have gone wrong while trying to transfer photos from the SD card in my Kodak DX6440 Digital Camera into iPhoto 6 in the Mac Mini.
I have visited the support pages for the Kodak camera, the Kingston SD card, as well as Apple's pages for iPhoto for some clues, but haven't found anything.
Here is the set-up. Have this wonderful 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4, with 1 GB of RAM, Mac Mini with the latest updates installed. Photo library still in the 40 GB internal with 15 GB still available.
The DX6440 Kodak camera has the latest firmware.
So far, until today, this Apple computer experience has been rather blissfully trouble free. (Even with this event, I have felt no where near the kind of frustration that my Windows machine regularly generates!)
Here's what happened: put camera on dock and pressed button to import pictures into iPhoto. IPhoto 6 comes up and recognizes camera no problem. Begins importing the photos and succeeds in importing the first 15 or so of the 187 before stalling. By "stalling," I actually mean IPhoto seems to be working on something for a little while and then presents an error message saying that the rest of the pictures are "unreadable." I tried starting over and importing the photos several times without success even trying to after quitting and restarting iPhoto, doing a shutdown and rebooting the Mac Mini, taking out and putting the card back in the camera while it was off and disconnected from the computer. None of these have helped. You should know several addition items: iPhoto stops on the same picture and does import it but with varying degrees of completeness ie. may be only the top 50% of the picture or the top 70% of the same picture each time I have tried to import all of the photos. I would have deleted this troublesome image and moved on if it wasn't just about the best one of the whole group! All images can be viewed on the screen of the camera, no problem. Yes, this is the first batch of photos I took using this brand new Kingston 512 MB SD card. Before this and while leading that blissful Apple computer life, I had been using a SanDisk 256 MB SD card in the camera. (Kodak support pages says that the camera can handle SD cards ranging from 8 to 512MB. Glad I didn't buy that 1 GB SD card I was looking at.)
Additional information: I connected the camera to my windows 98 machine and of course, while it tried to prepare to import the pictures it froze/crashed. Ha ha ha.. had to unplug, reboot, watch it chide me for not shutting down properly and scan disk. When I rebooted the win98 computer I had a brainstorm and used this computer as a guinea pig, not risking my beloved Mac Mini. Ha ha ha. Okay, sorry. I plugged the camera in directly into the usb, not using the dock and it loaded into "my computer." Opened and then clicked on each file and imported them one at a time into Kodak Easyshare program. The point of my evil window-rabbling is the images could be read as files and photos just fine and came up in viewer no problem. Even the image that had been imported only partially in iPhoto came up fine and complete. I even burned two photo CD's and imported the photos easily into iPhoto on the Mac Mini this way.
Here are my questions: Could the new SD card be corrupting only the importing process since the photo files themselves seem to be readable afterall? If I had forgone the dock and connected the camera directly to the Mac Mini, would it have mounted on the desktop and then could I have opened the pictures in preview and clicked and dragged either one or all of the images into iPhoto and have it work this way? Would it have worked clicking and dragging the images directly on to the iPhoto icon in Tiger's dock, without the use of preview? Would repairing permissions make a difference? This last probably not the thing as it killed the window98 computer as well, but hey. Is there anything else that I am overlooking?
Any ideas, even if just brainstorming, would be very much appreciated as I always like to know more about things, so I am better prepared next time. Thank you so much for perservering through this long post!- WP.

Answer 1

Hi, WP. Looks like the trouble you're having seems to be iPhoto losing access to your card. I'm just guessing here, but considering that you get through the same number of photos each time before iPhoto complains that the pictures are unreadable, it sounds like the camera has been turning itself off or sleeping.
If there's a way to connect the camera directly via USB or something, you could try and see if iPhoto sees the mounted card and is able to import from it. A good way to also check your pictures for "readability" is to look at them via Image Capture - it lets you browse the photos if you click Download Some. Then you can confirm that the other photos are readable.
I'm sure image capture and iPhoto use the same services of the OS to download pictures, so if one works the other should. Maybe you should try and time the download - see if iPhoto "loses" the card exactly at the same time?
Maybe the easyshare's own software can talk to the camera and keep it awake, while iPhoto assumes the camera knows to stay awake? My directly connected cameras never sleep while importing.