Friday, 12th January 2007ImageReady Droplet: Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file

The solution to the the frustrating ImageReady Droplet error

The Problem

You've been using Adobe ImageReady to batch process some images but for some reason (when you select an indeterminable number of files at once) you get the vague error"

Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

The Solution

The problem it seems is caused by the number of characters (letters) ImageReady can remember all at one - by this I mean the file name with the path. ImageReady can handle more files called "123.jpg, 124.jpg, 125.jpg" than it can files called "DSC000123.jpg, DSC000124.jpg, DSC000125.jpg," because the number of characters (letters) it needs to remember is less. Another factor is the location of the files being processed - ImageReady needs to know the path (the full location of the folder) where the images are, so an image stored in your My Pictures folder will typically have a path something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Pictures\DSC000123.jpg
C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Pictures\DSC000124.jpg
C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Pictures\DSC000125.jpg

Thats a lot of letters - if you move the files that are going to be processed to a folder in the root of your C drive temporarily, you could end up with something like this:

c:\imageTemp\DSC000123.jpg
c:\imageTemp\DSC000124.jpg
c:\imageTemp\DSC000125.jpg

A lot less letters!

Using the above fix I went from batch processing 20 images to over one hundred at a time!