Has anyone come across a file type "69F24B59 File"?

[CJ923]

Howdy - a customer came into my shop, an Asian lady, very little English, and wanted us to print some photos she had on her phone. She sent them in the body of an email to us, and while I was able to see the images in her email and download them, we could not open the files in any program other than Windows Photo Viewer, which wouldn't print them (in fact gave an error message that it could not find the file!) (When downloading, I was not given a file type option in the save dialog box other than that numerical sequence.)

Long story short, I printed out her email so at least she'd have the pictures. Took a screen shot of the folder of her files in list view, showing details (attached) and one of a folder holding a variety of 'normal' image files as a comparison to show her. Tried to suggest maybe someone at home could figure it out so next time it would be easier for her to print her photos. She politely refused, said it was 'no problem.' Well, I tried....

Everything is fine now except I am REALLY intrigued by wtf these are. Google never heard of them (that gave me pause indeed!)\

Can anyone shed some light on what these are? (the file icon changed after we opened them in Photo Viewer; previously it was just a generic file icon.)

Thanks!

 

[colleague]

maybe this happened

it seems that the file somehow lost its filename extension
it's possible that if you change the name into .jpg or.png or .tif or .bmp that you find what its extension was
and that you can open the file

it showed a generic icon because the compuer could not find the extension, and did not know which program to use
after opening it with photoviewer computer thought that he should use that program in future and changed the icon

 

[MrToM]

...Can anyone shed some light on what these are?...

They are just normal image files, like any other image file, except they use a proprietary naming convention.

It would have been useful to know what other software didn't open the files so in the absence of that info the following may or may not be relevant.

A filename can, in most cases, be anything. In this case it looks like its divided into two parts separated by an 'at' symbol, (%40)...

D30FF875 %40 B97D9D7B

This could mean anything, if anything at all, its just a filename....could be a date and time, who knows.

The file extension can also be anything within reason, and again in this case could represent anything. I can change the file extension of a normal .jpg file, (say to 69F24B59), and it will show as being of file type 69F24B59.
I could also change it to .MrToM_PSG and it will show it as being a MRTOM_PSG file type...Microsoft mentality...



So, I'd say that customer 'X' bought a Wanhunglow cheapy fone and used it to mail the images, thus it used its own internal naming convention. If the fone also came with its own software for file transfer to a PC then it would probably change the extension to a more recognisable type and also change the metadata to reflect an image/jpg MIME type as well.

The images would probably show [in an email] in a 'modern' browser like Firefox or Chrome as most modern browsers are capable of showing a vast array of file formats, more so than some image editing software.

As to not opening the file in other software....well, some 'smart' software like XnView, Irfanview, and surprisingly Windows Photo Viewer don't just go by the filename in order to choose which codec to use to open the file....they go deeper into the metadata and actually read what MIME type is assigned to it, rather than rely on just the filename alone....which as shown above can be edited to anything within reason.

The more 'dumb' software foolishly just reads the file extension and assumes that it must be right for the file type....I mean why would anyone want to change it...there's no reason to, right?
I'll mention no names but a certain 'Industry Standard' piece of software assumes the filename extension would never be changed, thus if the extension doesn't match any of those in its vocabulary then it just dismisses the file as 'the wrong file type' and fails to open it. This, as you have found, doesn't mean the file cannot be opened, just not by PS...ooops, I've given it away now.

As colleague has just beaten me into saying, simply changing the extension could be all that is needed to get both PS and Windows to recognise the file as an 'image' file. If you can view the properties of the file and it shows you the MIME type (image/jpg or image/png...etc) then you would then know what extension to use....otherwise its just a case of wading through each one till one works.

Thats about as much as I can explain, if you have the originals try finding out more fileinfo and changing a few things.....the main one is getting the right extension for the assigned MIME type.

Regards.
MrToM.

 

[CJ923]

So obvious and yet, it's been so long since that's happened it never occurred to me at all. That is most likely what happened, and I'm sure now it'll be the very first thing that comes to mind (changing the file extension suggestion, from my friend in Brussels)

Thank you!

- Clueless CJ

And thank you too, Mr ToM, whose reply I am about to read as it went up as I was typing just now ;-)