Question about Outlook Express

There’s a question at the end of this, which is the main reason I am writing, so if you want to skip to the end and see that, feel free to do so.  If you want a bit of the back story, read on.  J

My machine is an ASUS K55 Windows 7 laptop.

Many of you know I spent time in Italy earlier this year.  While there I took over 600 digital pictures.  It was my first venture into digital photography.  I downloaded them onto my computer while traveling.  Windows Live Photo Gallery was the default program that they opened up into.  The nice thing about Photo Gallery was that whenever I opened a photo, a side bar opened that allowed for adding info.  One of the options was to add a caption.  I captioned each and every photo.  I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to download the photos and do all this captioning, I who am technology challenged.  J

However, what I didn’t know was that the photos were in RAW format.  Shortly after coming home, my computer crashed.  Best Buy put in a new hard drive, and fortunately I had all my data backed up on an external hard drive, including the photos.  What I found out when I tried to open the photos after the data was transferred to the new machine was that I could no longer open them.  I also could not upload them to any photo sharing site, which was how I eventually discovered, through a lot of research and noodling around, that the photos were in RAW format.  They need to be JPEGs to share and upload.

Best Buy downloaded a program onto my computer and tried to open the RAW photos on the new machine. It didn’t work, and in fact changed the something about the thumbnails—maybe even the label under the thumbnail (I watched them change before my eyes while at BB).  They said there was no way I could have opened them with my old machine because Photo Gallery cannot open RAW pictures.   I didn’t use the words I wanted to with them, other than to tell them that the photos did, in fact, open on the old machine, and that I had not downloaded any program to open them, nor did I have any software to do that.  After a lot more research on my own, I eventually found out that RAW pictures supposedly require a special program (codec) to open them.  Canon makes one for 32 bit machines, but my machine is a 64 bit.  I believe the Canon 32 bit codec was what BB had downloaded.

Microsoft came out with a codec for reading Canon RAW this summer.  I have used that as well, but the captions do are not there with that, either.

The interesting question remains:  how did the old hard drive open the RAW photos?  Was it actually a 32 bit machine that got marketed and sold as a 64?  And even if that is the case, according to Best Buy, and my experience with the new machine, Photo Gallery does not open the RAW photos. Making it more complicated was that the new machine didn’t have Photo Gallery.  Windows had changed their viewer to Media Player. 

I eventually bought a copy of Canon Digital Photo Professional, which allowed me to convert the photos to JPEGs.  That’s the good news.  I can now view them all easily, and have been able to get prints made.

But—and here’s the reason I am writing, actually—the bigger problem is that none of the 600 plus captions are with the photos, either when I open them with DPP or as JPEGs.  Does anyone know if there is any chance that those captions might have been saved somewhere in a file, either on their own, or maybe readable with Photo Gallery or in a file somehow attached to Photo Gallery?  I have since gone to Microsoft’s web site and downloaded Photo Gallery, and used that to open the JPEGs (it still  won’t open the RAW), but the captions still are not there.

I am heartbroken over this.  I saw so many beautiful sights while in Italy, and now I have little or no idea what many of them are.  I went into dozens of churches and towns, and I cannot tell which is which (I can’t even recall the names of most of them at this point).

If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful.

Thanks!