tospf™ is a utility for exporting ShowMaker™ slideshow projects to a Sony® PHD-A55 Digital Photo Frame, a Sony® FDL-1500MX1 Memory Stick™ Television (Japanese page) or similar (hereafter Digital Photo Frame). It creates a set of picture files in a specified destination folder (or directly in a Memory Stick™) in the format required by the Digital Photo Frame, whose names are numbered in the order the pictures appear in the ShowMaker slideshow. The Digital Photo Frame will display these files in the same order as the original ShowMaker slideshow. tospf™ scales all the pictures to the size of the Digital Photo Frame screen to minimize file size and the number of Memory Sticks you must buy. tospf™ can optionally crop pictures with aspect ratios different than the Digital Photo Frame to remove the need for black borders. Best of all tospf™ requires no manual intervention. A 500-slide show can be exported in just a few minutes.Using tospf™, slideshows can be transferred to the Digital Photo Frame much more easily and quickly than when using the Sony supplied software.
tospf can be used either from the command prompt or via its GU interface.
Normally launched from the Start Menu, the GUI is the easier way to use tospf™.
Complete the top two fields in the GUI, ShowMaker Project and Output Folder, then click the Generate Show button. If you want to stop the export, click the Abort button. Aborting does not remove any files already created. Note: Generate Show will overwrite any files in the output folder that have the same name as a generated file.
All other fields are optional and have appropriate defaults. The following lists describe the fields in detail.
ShowMaker Project: type the full path to the ShowMaker project you want to export. Alternatively use the Browse button to navigate to and select the project file.
Output Folder: type the full path to the folder where you want the output files to be written. Alternatively use the Browse button to navigate to and select the output folder. If you have a Memory Stick adapter on your computer, you can select the proper Memory Stick folder (Dcim\100msdcf) as the output folder.
Artist Name: type in the name of the artist who made the picture. This information is embedded into each output file. Regrettably the PHD-A55 does not display the artist's name. FDL-1500MX1 behaviour is unknown.
Copyright: type in a copyright message. This information is embedded into each output file. Regrettably the PHD-A55 does not display the full copyright message, only the word "COPYRIGHT". FDL-1500MX1 behaviour is unknown.
Quality: this sets a quality level for the output files. The quality level sets the tradeoff between file size and picture quality. Higher numbers give higer quality images and larger file sizes. The default (65) provides a good compromise given the small size of the PHD-A55 screen. If you have an FDL-1500MX1 you might want to increase the quality level to, say, 75.
DPFSize: check either PHD-A55 or FDL-1500MX1 depending on which screen you are using. Shows generated for the FDL-MX1500MX1 will run fine on the the PHD-A55. They just take more space in the Memory Stick.
Enlarge To Fit: set this if you want pictures that are smaller than the Digital Photo Frame screen to be enlarged to fit the screen. The pictures scanned from 35mm film onto a Kodak Picture Disk, for example, are 600x400 pixels. You might want these enlarged to maximise use of the Digital Photo Frame screen and to avoid any black bars. If a small picture is not being enlarged, the picture will not be cropped so the following Crop options do not apply. The crop options do still apply for pictures larger than the Digital Photo Frame screen hence the options are not disabled when Enlarge To Fit is not selected.
Horizontal Crop: select from this option menu how or whether you want the pictures to be cropped when the width needs to be adjusted to fit the Digital Picture Frame. This option applies only when the aspect ratio of the picture is different from that of the Digital Picture Frame. The Digital Picture Frame's aspect ratio is 1.33:1 (4:3). Only pictures whose aspect ratio is > 1.33 and <= 1.5 will be cropped horizontally. Ratios greater than 1.5 would require too much cropping. In these cases, or if "None" is selected, the picture is displayed with black bars at top and bottom (letterboxed). Pictures scanned from 35mm film typically have an aspect ratio of 1.5:1.
Vertical Crop: select from this option menu how or whether you want the pictures to be cropped when the height needs to be adjusted to fit the Digital Picture Frame. This option applies only when the aspect ratio of the picture is different from that of the Digital Picture Frame. The Digital Picture Frame's aspect ratio is 1.33:1 (4:3). Only pictures whose aspect ratio is >= 1.25 and < 1.33 will be cropped vertically. Ratios less than 1.25 would require too much cropping. In these cases, or if "None" is selected, the picture is displayed with black bars at the sides. Many digital cameras take 1280x1024 pixel pictures. These have an aspect ratio of 1.25:1.
Output File Name Template: enter a template for the names of the output
files. This is a sprintf style template. Long file names are not permitted.
The PHD-A55 requires that filenames be in 8.3 format. FDL-1500MX1 behaviour
is unknown but will certainly support 8.3 format. The default template "dscf%04d.jpg"
creates files whose names are "dscf" followed by four
decimal digits and the extension ".jpg".
Begin File Numbering From: enter the number for the first file. This option allows you to append one show to another already in the MemoryStick™.
In most cases you simply type the following command in a command prompt window:
tospf srcproj ... destdir
srcproj is the name of the file where you saved your ShowMaker project. If you enter more than one project, the pictures will be concatenated in the output.
destdir is the name of the location where you want the output files written.
tospf™ has the following options (names may be abbreviated) that correspond to the GUI fields described above.
-artist "artist's name" Artist name to embed in output file -copyright "copyright message" Copyright message to embed in output file -enlargeEnlarge small pictures to fit the frame -size WxH Set the DPF size -hcrop left Crop left of picture to fit to Sony DPF shape. -hcrop right Crop right of picture to fit to Sony DPF shape. -hcrop bothCrop left and right equally to fit to Sony DPF shape. (Default) -hcrop none Do not crop picture horizontally. Results in black bars on top and bottom. -vcrop top Crop top of picture to fit to Sony DPF shape. (Default) -vcrop bottom Crop bottom of picture to fit to Sony DPF shape. -vcrop bothCrop top and bottom equally to fit to Sony DPF shape -vcrop none Do not crop picture vertically. Results in black bars on the sides. -template <dsf%04d.jpg> Sprintf style template for the output file name. Note that the file name must use 8.3 format. -firstnum <number> The number to use in the file name for the first picture. Subsequent pictures will be numbered sequentially from this point.
If you plan to use the command prompt version, you will want to add the folder where you have installed it (normally Program Files:\Edgewise\tospf) to your PATH environment variable. In Windows 98 you do this by adding a line to your autoexec.bat file. In Windows 2000 right click on My Computer and select Properties. In the Properties panel, click the Advanced tab and then the Environment Variables button.
The PHD-A55 (and presumably the FDL-1500MX1) requires (unnecessarily) that files be in EXIF format. EXIF (EXchangeable Image File) is a variant of the JPEG file format. The only difference between EXIF and the more common JFIF lies in the metadata describing the image.
tospf™ preserves all the EXIF metadata from input files that are already in EXIF format. This includes things like date and time the image was taken and camera settings used. In the event that tospf™ modifies the image in an EXIF file, it changes the Modified Date in the output EXIF file and adds a comment describing what it did, e.g. "cropped" or "resampled". If the input is not an EXIF file, the Modified Date is always written even if no image processing is performed.
tospf™ inserts the caption provided for the image in the ShowMaker slideshow into the file as the EXIF "Description" field.
Regrettably, the PHD-A55 does not display the date the picture was made or the description. It appears to display only the date the file was created. Also, it only displays the file name, even when a description exists. FDL-1500MX1 behaviour is unknown.
tospf™ processes an image only when it has to. If the source image is in a JPEG file and no scaling or cropping is to be performed, the image is not decompressed and recompressed during conversion to EXIF. This contrasts with the Sony supplied software which decompresses and recompresses an image when converting to "Memory Stick" format and, in doing so, often nearly doubles the size of the file as well as introducing noise into the picture.
Input images can be in any of the common image file formats: EXIF (.jpg), JFIF (.jpg), PNG (png), Windows BMP (.bmp), Windows Icon (.ico), PIC (.pic), PNM (.pbm, .pgm, .ppm), .SGI (.bw, .rgb, .rgba, .sgi), TARGA (.tga), TIFF (.tif, .tiff), DOOM, QUAKE, and a few more. GIF is not supported because of the patent issues.
tospf v1.03 introduces support for the Sony® FDL-1500MX1 Memory Stick™ Television. It also contains changes needed to support ShowMaker v2.9.
tospf v1.02 fixes an issue when the ShowMaker project file has been saved in the same directory as the picture files. In this case, because ShowMaker writes only the file names of the picture files and not the full path names, tospf would not find the picture files.
tospf v1.01 produces much higher quality images when enlarging small images to fit the Sony Photo Frame.
tospf v1.01 fixes a number of small issues with the GUI version: copyrights and artists names were not being put in the files correctly and the file name template was ignored. Both versions could unnecessarily process the images under certain circumstances.
For technical questions and problems, e-mail your questions to .
Please send your suggestions for improvements and enhancements to .
Copyright 2001 Mark Callow, dba Edgewise Consulting. All rights reserved.
tospf is a trademark of Edgewise Consulting.
ShowMaker is trademark of dmagic, Demmark.
Sony is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. Memory Stick is a trademark
of Sony Corporation.
tospf™ is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
tospf™ uses the Developers' Image processing Library DevIL, Copyright 2002 by Denton Woods. DevIL is licensed under the Gnu Lesser Public License (GLPL). The GLPL license requires us to provide the following information for those developing their own versions of this library:
If you wish to use other versions of DevIL with tospf™, you must make sure your version is based on very recent (03/2002) source for version 1.3 or above. Replace the dlls DevIL.dll, ilu.dll and ilut.dll, with your own versions and restart the application. These DLLs are normally found in the Windows folder.