Recently I was looking thru some old CDs of files I had on my computer in the 1990s. I was looking for a chapter I had written on a future book, and still cannot find it. In the process I discovered a number of pictures I had take on a Kodak digital camera.

The pictures were taken in 1997 through 1999. The camera was an early digital camera that the college had bought for me to demonstrate digital photography to my students. I found a number of folders of pictures and remembered taking most of them. The camera had very low resolution and you could only shoot about 7-10 pictures on it and then you had to connect to a PC and download them. There were no flash cards in them. The pictures quality was no where near what we have today, but better than I recalled.

The camera shot pictures in .kdc format and I had converted some to .jpg on the CDs back then and could look at the .jpg pictures. However my computer did not know what to do with .kdc other than tell me it was a raw format.

After a brief search on the Internet I discovered Kodak’s program to read the pictures is still available and that several paid programs (Photoshop requires downloading and installing the Camera Raw Plug-in and I did not have luck with this with my CS5 copy) will handle .kdc and that Picasa will read and convert Picasa.

I tried to get the Kodak program but it has not been updated and will not run on 64 bit Windows 7. I did not try in XP bur suspect it may work. I then went to Picasa (Google’s free photo editing and storage program) which I was already set up in and it opened and converted the .kdc files fine.

I have seen this several times where Picasa will work with obscure historic formats (strange calling things from 15-20 years ago historic). I am now going thru all the pictures and converting and saving to .jpg on my current machine where the rest of my digital pictures are stored.

If you find a file with an obscure extension search the Internet for that extension and you probably will find a program (probably free also) that will work with the file.