Photos on USB not being recognised at photo print kiosks

Mac
#1

hi,

i don’t now what am i doing wrong but my local BigW photo print kiosk is not recognising any of my USB sticks i take over there to print photos from.

i have lots of USB 2.0 and 3.0 sticks of many different sizes, 8gb, 16gb and even 32gb…all of them i tried the following format options to copy photos to (export option from photos app, El capitan OS)

  • OSX Extend (Journalled)
  • MS-DOS FAT
  • ExFAT

the drive is visible on OSX device (iMac and Mac Pro) and a Windows device (Laptop running Win7) the photos i export from Photos app are also visible one the above mentioned devices just not the local BigW kiosk :frowning:
i also tried another Kodak kiosk at an independent photo shop…no luck :frowning:

Disk Utility has an option when erasing the USB stick, which Scheme option should i be using?
is there something in Photos app that is set which prevents the export to work properly?

Marcin

#2

The answer to this is probably much simpler than SD card formatting, or export options from iPhoto. A JPEG is a JPEG, after all.

You know how when you take photos on an SD card, and you stick that SD card into your Mac, then iPhoto/Photos pops up and asks you whether you want to import those photos? How does it know to do that compared to a normal USB stick with photos on it?

The answer lies in the DCIM folder.

Try this (you’ll probably want your USB drive to be formatted as MS-DOS FAT for compatibility, although ExFAT is also likely to work):

  1. Create a DCIM folder at the root of your USB drive.
  2. Create another folder in that, named 100PICTS (or whatever you want, as long as it’s 100 followed by 5 characters).
  3. Put your photos inside that folder. It probably doesn’t matter what they’re called, as long as they’re a .JPG.

Should look something like this:

Then take it to BigW and see if your photos are recognised then :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

Master Boot Record + FAT is what a PC stick will be by default. Should be read by any of those kiosks - they shouldn’t need the DCIM folder although I guess it couldn’t hurt. I’d probably also favour a USB2 stick (I’ve seen weird issues with USB3 sticks in USB2 ports as those machines no doubt are).

GUID is OS X only (or used to be). APM is Power PC boot drives.

Edit: and yes, as @bennyling says, make sure you have file extensions on the .jpg files, and PC compatible names - no weird characters etc.

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#4

Did you try Windows utilites, for example, SDFormatter? Choose exFat option, which is optimal for Mac OS X.