.XDW extension

[bright.ton42]

A friend scanned some photos for me (I don't have a scanner) and sent them to me as an attachment so I can email them to a relative.

However the extension is .xdw which I can't open -  I asked her to scan them to JPG but maybe she can't. I want to be able to open them as JPegs and edit them first, but as I said none of my programs will recognise the extension. I thought when you scanned something you could save it to JPG?

Any feedback welcomed, thanks.

[cq_tech · Accepted solution]

Bright, xdw is a proprietary image format used by Fuji Xerox DocuCentre scanners and copiers; may include both images and text, as well as links to Web pages or other documents. As far as I know, the only free Windows program that will open these files is a free app called File Viewer Lite for Windows and can be downloaded fro free from http://www.fileinfo.com/software/windows_file_viewer (latest version available is Version 1.1.1 - Released May 30, 2014).

There is also another program called FileViewPro which will open XDW files (as well as many other proprietary formats) available from http://www.fileviewpro.com/en/file-extension-xdw but you have to pay for this one and I don't know how much it costs.

However, even if you were to DL the free File Viewer Lite, it will let you open these files but if you wanted to email them to others there's not much point unless they also go to the trouble of downloading the same program. I just can't imagine why your friend wouldn't have used a freely portable format like JPG or PNG or BMP, or indeed just about anything else that can be opened by 99% of all available file viewers.

Your best 2 options here are to either buy an inexpensive scanner and do them yourself, or ask your friend to rescan them to JPG format (and keep your fingers crossed and hope that's what you'll actually receive next time). Sorry I couldn't be any more helpful than the above.

[bright.ton42]

No you were very helpful,  many thanks.   I did ask her to scan them to JPeg but got the XDW which I'm not going to mess

around with - can't be bothered.  As I have been thinking of buying a scanner I will do so and play around with them myself.  I'm pretty sure they can be scanned to JPG so it will be a challenge which I dont mind.