I’ve tried everything I can think of and now I’m stuck. My problem is that while my mother (in Scotland) can open picture files I send her, I cannot open the picture files she sends me. Every program I try to open them gives me the message “file type unknown” or similar. My mother tells me she has sent files as JPEG, TIFF etc, and although I have programs which work with these and many other formats (eg PaintShop Pro, and ACDSee as per your recent recommendation), no luck. I think the root of the problem may be in that while I have a PC clone, she drives a Mac - but she has sent files supposedly specially formatted for Windows, and they still don’t open..I do hope you can help.

This is an unusual problem because graphics files are multi-platform (ie. they can work on Mac’s, PC’s, etc…). I suggest that you ask your mother again to send a graphic file to you in the JPEG format and when received by you, check that it has a file extension (ie. *.jpg). Without a file extension the graphics programs can not recognise the files. If there isn’t an extension, rename the file adding on the extension eg. Filename.jpg. Now try and open it in your image viewer and see if it works. If it doesn’t please get back to me and I will investigate the problem further.