Photo Import software for media reader

[stewey]

Hi,

Stupidly I bought a Belkin Media Reader for iPod without sussing things out properly. It turns out it wont work with my CF cards which have had photos saved on them by my Sigma SD10 dSLR. The reason being is that the camera does not save its files in a folder called 'DCIM' but instead puts them in a folder called 'Images'.

Does anybody know if its possible to hack the iPod software so that it will look in another folder other than DCIM for photos? I'm thinking there must be someone who has solved this problem already so that they can copy any files on a memory onto their iPod.

Other than hacking the software I can't think of any other way to make this work apart from hacking the firmware on my camera to create a different file system - something less likely that someone has done before and definately more of a scary concept for me.

Any thoughts or pointers in the right direction would be greatly appretiated.

[fryke]

I don't actually think it'd be easier to hack the iPod than the camera... (?)

[stewey]

Well i just figured somebody has more likely hacked an iPod in this way than somebody doing it to the cameras firmware so it'd be more likely thats theres information out there to be guided by. Personally I have no idea how to go about doing either though.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

In this case, hacking the iPod would do nothing, since the iPod doesn't even know about the CF Card -- but the Belkin card reader does, so you'd have to hack it... not the iPod.

[stewey]

Now that's something I wouldn't mind hacking as its useless to me at the moment anyway. Is anybody able to point me in the right direction on how I would go about doing that?

[stewey]

um yeah that's not very helpful. Like I said the camera does not save my photos in a folder called "DCIM" like most cameras which the iPod is programmed to look in for your photos so I can't just import my photos.

I may have sorted this by changing the words "DCIM" in iPods firmware to "Images" (the folder that my camera does save my folders in). Only problem is that I'm guessing now the iPods checksum is now incorrect so this new copy of the firmware wont work on the iPod and I've no idea how to calculate the new checksum - D'oh!

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Yes, checksum:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum

I do believe that Mac OS X includes a checksum program (command-line, of course) to calculate checksums for files. In fact, our good friend Mark Liyanage put a Cocoa wrapper around it and made it drag-and-drop simple... it may help you in your quest to hack the iPod:

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/#checksum

[stewey]

Thanks very much I'll look into it. Its all still a bit new to me learning about checksums and using terminal but i'm getting there slowly. I did take a brief look at the checksum command line with the original firmware but it didn't seem to match up with anything that was in the hex so i gave up. if anyone else has changed the checksum of the ipod firmware and has any advice I'd be very tahnkful to hear about it.