Microsoft Picture It incompatability with Windows 7 and alternatives for .mix files.

Dear Marianne

I think there's something even your best friends can't tell you. At  a safer distance, perhaps I can. I think you've made your point about Microsoft - and no one is arguing, not even Microsoft. But you seem reluctant to consider other ways of achieving the same ends - do you fear it might take attention away from your grievance? I have suggested some approaches that might work - might even in the end be better - but you seem uninterested. If you can't face the possibility that life is possible without Picture It, why send posts to the forum?

It's perhaps worth mentioning that I was also dismayed when I could no longer use Picture It, but I found other ways of doing what I wanted to do. I wouldn't go back to Picture It for those things now. You might find the same with your objectives if you were prepared to try some new programs. 

Good luck with whatever you do anyway - particularly if it gets Microsoft to do a U-turn!

John Presland

16I am also keeping a 16-year-old Pentax Optio camera limping along, and you don't even want to know what a pain that has been!

But as for the larger images, are you sure you have PictureIt set on "professional?" That's the setting that will open the largest images without reducing the pixel count.

16Now we're getting to the part where people don't understand the issue. The ".mix" extension is the PictureIt file format that saves YOUR WORK, and not just a merged image. Nothing else will open that file and preserve the layers and individual cutouts.

We are not always talking about a few pieces or an item or two, or even a week's worth of effort. We are talking about years of work, reams of work, entire catalogs of work, carefully created and saved in editable form in PictureIt, and now all useless and inaccessible because Microsoft left us holding the bag when they failed to live up to their promise.

If it were just a matter of some merged image still being in jpeg form, it really wouldn't matter. You can open a lousy jpeg in just about anything and touch up the color or clone over a flaw. But when what you need is to open the WORK FILE and access or alter a dozen or a hundred individual cut-out images, the transparency levels and blended edges of which absolutely cannot simply be cut and pasted into or copied over to any other program, you are screwed.

It's not a matter of stupid templates or silly crap like swapping heads or putting someone's face on a dollar bill. You can do that kind of clumsy low-level stuff with thirteen hundred dozen and 12 other programs. But nothing else will duplicate or even open the massive amounts of intricate, delicate, time-consuming work we did in PictureIt, nor will any other program make the same quality collage. All most other so-called collage makers do is past your image into their ugly template, which is useless.

So unless Microsoft makes good on its promise to always support their own software in newer operating systems, if all that will work is PictureIt, millions of people are stuck with no other option that maintaining older computers that will still run XP -- and with whatever scanners and printers that still work with XP -- because there simply is no other choice.

Microsoft made us a promise when we invested in their software, and they let us down.

I've never heard of .mix files. I use JPEG, which is the more or less standard format for photos, unless you want to fill a house wall. You can use JPEGs for almost anything. I haven't been able to find any program that uses .mix. Presumably Picture It did. Perhaps it was the format for saving pictures in that program. But you don't need to do that. I used to save Picture it creations as JPEGs, which are extremely versatile.

Both Photoshop Elements and Paint.net save pictures in any of the range of formats it permits, and you can save your collage as any of those. It is then effectively a single picture and you can edit it at any time in either program. i did this with the examples of my own collages which I mentioned. The range of editing possibilities is greater in both programs than in Picture It.

John Presland

Yes, John... .mix is the PictureIt format.  Saving to this format keeps the project workable/editable in the program.  Once you are done, you have the option to save projects to the more standard formats (jpeg, png, etc.) but you can no longer edit the pieces of the project in those formats.  Sure... you can adjust coloring, crop, add to it... but if you want to go in and remove an item from the project (ie the decoration on my sister's forehead), you cannot do that in those other formats.  In fact, when you select "Save As" to one of the other formats, you get a warning that if you proceed, you will not be able to edit in that format.  As you said... once saved to those formats, it is "effectively a single picture" and the individual elements used to create it are no longer accessible individually.

You nailed it on the head when you said "I haven't been able to find any program that uses .mix".   Because of this, I have hundreds of projects that CANNOT be opened or used in anything other than PictureIt.  I primarily do what I do for fun and gifts... but others have entire professional catalogues that were created using PI that are now useless relics thanks to MS not continuing to support their program.