A few days ago I received a technical support query from someone at Palm, Inc. This is fairly unusual, though they have on occasion worked with us on compatibility with new devices and things like that.
This query was a mystery though. A large number of Treo 650 and Treo 700p smartphone owners were reporting the same thing:
- I have AcidImage installed
- AcidImage is magically showing me pictures that I thought had been lost
- I have discovered strange files on my Treo called “ImageLib_imageDB.pdb” and “ImageLib_mainDB.pdb”
For the folks at Palm, it began to look as if AcidImage was somehow recovering images that had previously been lost and stuffing them into these databases. They asked me if this was possible.
AcidImage does find every image it can on a device, so it wasn’t too surprising that it was able to find images that the built-in viewer could not find. But I did agree that it was a peculiar coincidence that these strange “ImageLib” databases were only noticed by people with AcidImage installed.
After looking into it for a bit, I was able to solve the mystery pretty quickly. The “ImageLib_imageDB.pdb” and “ImageLib_mainDB.pdb” files were originally created by the Treo 600 built-in image application. Any picture taken with the Treo 600 built-in camera would be stored in these files. And, if many pictures were taken, those database files would get pretty large.
BUT, these people all had a Treo 650 or a Treo 700p. So how did those “old” databases get created? Well, it turns out that all of these users ALSO had owned a Treo 600, and during the upgrade process, the pictures from their Treo 600 were copied on to their new Treo. They never noticed them, however, because the built-in image viewer that Palm provides doesn’t support the image database that was created by the Treo 600.
Then, one day, these people installed AcidImage and were shocked to discover that all of their old pictures from their Treo 600 that they thought were gone forever were actually right there all along. Of course, AcidImage DOES support the old Treo 600 image database, even on a Treo 650 or 700p, so it found the pictures and displayed them, much to the surprise of these users who thought those pictures were gone.
The information being fed to Palm was basically: “a) my deleted pictures are being undeleted by AcidImage.” and “b) I never noticed these huge ImageLib files on my Treo until I installed AcidImage.” Clearly these two facts would lead anyone to suspect AcidImage as the (somewhat magical) culprit.
But the real info is this:
- If you previously owned a Treo 600 and upgrade to a Treo 650 or 700p, those old pictures you thought you lost might actually be on your new Treo
- The built-in image viewer on the new Treos won’t view the pictures that were taken with your old Treo
- If you install AcidImage, it will try to find those old, long-lost Treo 600 pictures and show them to you
- You can recover those long lost Treo 600 pictures - use AcidImage to copy those files from the old Treo 600 database to an SD card simply by using the “Copy” option in the AcidImage menu. You’ll then have normal JPEGs that can be viewed on your computer or with any other application that can view JPEGs. (You can also use AcidImage to delete the pictures and free up the space they are using if you don’t want them).
So that solves the mystery… and, to anyone who has experienced this mystery first hand, whether you decide to keep or kill those old Treo 600 photos, thanks for trying AcidImage!
