Computer newbies forum: help opening an .alb file

The obvious advice in cases like this is to contact the person you received it from and ask him/her to send a format you can display or point to a free reader for what they sent. I'm sure most people will find this a reasonable request. Alb certainly is exotic.

As you might know, jpg-files can be viewed with IE, but you might prefer to download the very nice and useful program irfanview from www.irfanview.com. It opens a LOT of picture formats (although the album) and is totally free. Recommended.

Kees

I never said IrfanView will open an .ALB file, and I believe Kees just mistyped what he really meant when he wrote:
"It opens a LOT of picture formats (although the album)"

He missed a word there, what I'm sure he meant was:
"It opens a LOT of picture formats (although not the album)"

Anyway, if you read any of the IrfanView website, or looked in the list of file formats in the tool itself, you will not find .ALB there.

That is one of the reasons I believe that .ALB is not a graphic format, but just a "catalog."
Well, that PLUS the fact that XnView does not list .ALB either. XnView read over 400 graphic formats!

XnView is a much more powerful graphic viewer and manipulator. Still free, though. But being more powerful, it is also bigger, and more complex to use.

I still prefer IrfanView, for most of what I want to do.

I believe the *.alb file you are referring to is a Canon Photo Record Album.

Your friend probably has a Canon digital camera and has created an album of photos with picture frames and other decorations he wants to share with you. Unfortunately, he thinks that you will get the album if he sends you the ALB file.

He may have read somewhere that Canon Photo Record allows Photo Albums to be sent, but this feature is available only in the Gold version and I believe he has the standard free version.

I have just tested out Canon Photo Record which came with my Canon IXUS 400 (also known as the Powershot S400) on a folder with 10 photos totalling 921kb. The alb file is only 12kb. It is basically a settings file, like the desktop.ini you find in C:\Windows. BTW, I don't use this program, I merely have it.

As Kees suggested, get your friend to send you the actual photos.

If he wants to dress up the photo as a greeting card, he should use one of the card making programs like Print Artist or Printshop both of which allow for creations to be emailed.

Hope this helps.

Irishgirl,

As you can read in the excellent post by Thor2K you replied to, a alb-file is just something like a directory or a table of contents. It doesn't congain the actual pictures. That fully explains why your sister couldn't see the photographs, and why you can't see them either, because they disappeared from your system in the aftermath of the crash.

It should be general knowledge (but alas it isn't) that hard disks often crash and that you really need to 'backup' everything you don't want to lose in such an event to another medium like a cd-r(w) or a dvd-r(w)/+r(w). You've learned what happens if you don't.

In another forum there was a thread yesterday called 'I deleted part of my girlfriends thesis'. She had no backup either, apparently. This could have resulted in consequences even more serious than the incident with his wife Arnold Schwarzenegger told about this week, but - luckily, and quite unexpectedly I must say - the file could be recovered. Good for everyone, you'll agree.

Kees

I have been following this thread, hoping that someone would be able to help me with the .alb extension as well.

I have been researching this extension for the past two days. I've downloaded about 10 programs (mostly Picture Album type programs) trying to get one of them to open my .alb file. Nothing has worked!

I know it's an album file. I've opened the file in a Hex editor and seen that there are 4 .jpg pictures within the file/album. Extracting these pics is the problem.

I'm in a Computer Forensic and Investigation class in school and this .alb file is in one of my labs.

I was positive it would open with a JASC program. Go to www.jasc.com and find the Paint Shop Pro download. From what I've researched the .alb file SHOULD open with that program. I'm downloading it now and it's 98mb.

I also tried opening it with Diji Album and Diji Viewer, to no avail. But that could just be that my file is corrupted or something. Others should try the Diji Album or Diji Viewer or Diji Editor, from what I've read it SHOULD open with those as well.

I am pretty sure that .ALB can be a album. I am going to look it up .