QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture
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| These are primarily notes This is probably not going to be complete in any real sense, and exists to contain bits of useful information. |
Contents |
Problem
In a Microsoft Office document, you see one of the following:
- "QuickTime(TM) and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture"
- "QuickTime(TM) and a Photo - JPEG decompressor are needed to see this picture."
- and translations like "Zur Anzeige wird der Quicktime Dekompressor "TIFF (LZW) benotigt"
...instead of an image.
Reason
A combination of:
- The Mac version of MS Office, which allows embedding images via Quicktime
- the fact that support for certain formats that Quicktime for Mac supports were omitted from Quicktime for windows (including and quite possibly PICT)
...meaning that when you use one of the unusual formats omitted from Windows Quicktime, this will not be viewable on non-Macs.
Workarounds
There is no immediate patch to read documents that show this problem.
One workaround is to go to the platform you made the document on and make sure the embedding is done with a more usual/portable image format. Converting it while in the document may be nontrivial work, but can usually be done with less work than re-embedding and re-positioning the image; Various in-document image-related actions imply conversion to a more usual format as a side effect, which is arguably the simplest solution.
If you have no access to a mac, you may choose to extract just the images, which you can do without access to a mac, via a trick: when you export to a web page, images are either directly converted to something useful, or in the case of PICT/TIFF, images are saved to .pcz files, which are gzipped PICT files.
You can extract the image from the .pcz using winrar, 7zip, gzip for windows, or something like it.
You should probably rename it to give it the .pict extension. It may still be quite hard to view and convert this file. In my case, the quicktime image viewer crashed, and photoshop complained that it could only open raster PICTs.
Irfanview managed once the optional irfanview plugins were installed, and allows saving to another format.
Further notes:
One page suggests that this is caused specifically by pasting such images, suggesting that 'Insert image' always converts to something portable - I don't know how true that is(verify).
