pcdMagic for Android

Like a lot of veteran photographers, I got a lot of my images scanned at the dawn of the digital age, on Kodak Photo CDs. The files, PCDs, were pretty good, but when Kodak faltered and this format went away, Adobe, in their wisdom, decided to stop dealing with this file type somewhere in the Photoshop updates. I didn’t notice it until it was too late…I needed to go back to some early scans and no version of Photoshop I had would recognize them. There were obscure, bizarre workarounds out there, but PCDMagic is the first full featured straightforward program I’ve encountered that unlocked all those old scans and let me access these images again after all these years. A lifesaver.

I used this app to convert my collection of PhotoCDs to tiff format for use in Adobe Lightroom, as Lightroom does not have a direct conversion built into it. The process requires you to load the PhotoCD files into PCMagic’s browser then select photos for conversion. After selecting a place to put the tiffs on your hard drive’s file system, the conversion is then done reasonably quickly. Then you can load the resultant tiffs into Lightroom. This was done without problems. I would not have been able to read my PhotoCDs without this program, so it proved invaluable. There is a function where you can edit an ex-PCD tiff file that is already in Lightroom by transfering it back to PCDMagic for some editing, but I found this integration to be a bit clumsy. I might change my mind on this in the future as my use of this feature was cursory. Some of the editing features in PCDMagic are claimed to be more effective than other programs, but I have not used these features to a significant extent just yet, although those I tried seemed to work just fine. When I tried to use editing features more extensively I had a few crashes, probably because I had too many images loaded into PCDmagic. Finally, as I used PCDmagic only as a format conversion program, and the editing features are limited anyway, I found the price to be steep.

It is hard to believe that my Photo CD’s - all made in the 90’s and early 2000’s - are now so completely out of date that virtually NOTHING will read them! I am so thankful for PCDMagic because it not only works very well, it allows we to access thousands of great photos from the past! I also have found them very responsive to technical questions. I ran into the Google-caused problem with certificates, and was able to get back up and running PCDMagic the next day. If you have old Photo CD’s laying around, this is the only program I have found that will recover the photos correctly.