I am working on a project in CS3 and when I started to load some photos in a certain segment CS3 started crashing. It now crashes any time I start it up and attempt to load any of the photos. Has anyone had problems with CS3 crashing with photos? The files are jpegs and are viewable so there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the photo files. Is anyone aware of issues with CS3 with where files are stored? I've put the photos in a folder in the project folder. I've done lots of projects with photos and not had any crashes. Any ideas?

Pix size, maybe?

Vasco

I'm not sure if it is right or not - but I once read somewhere that .PNG files work best in Premiere.

Pic size can be an issue as can the pic format. My experience leads me to believe that most of the crash/failures in PP occur when it runs out of memory. Large pictures can exacerbate that. You might want to shrink the pix down to the size you actually need. If you have invokes the 3GB switch on your system, you might consider that too. It will allocate more memory to your applications. Google "3GB switch" for the procedure.

I have heard that PP favors TIFF, but it would make sense that PNG works too. I'd stay away from JPEG and PSD, although I've had good luck with PSDs as most of my stills end up either PSD or TIFF after I finish retouching them.

Thanks for all the great suggestions. I found the culprit was a single image, a jpeg file and once I deleted it, PP worked fine. I've actually done a lot of videos with photo inserts that were in their original resolution of anywhere from 3 to 7 megabytes without any problems. I edit on a Intel Mac Pro with 8 megabytes of ram and haven't had any serious problems with photos until this one. What is strange is that the photo file looks fine in preview or Photoshop. I can't see any problems with it, but it sure pulled PP to its knees really quick.

CS3 has a maximum picturedimension of 4000 pixel width or height. CS4 has the same limitation if I am not mistaking.
Larger dimensions will give errors.
(12,1 Megapixels is just a bit too large)
JPG compression should never be a problem. (From a technical point of view... from an esthetic point of view jpgs can look horrible, but that depands on the applied compression)