HP Image Zone comes with HP cameras and printers, and is, in general, perfectly adequate for routine image printing and minor manipulation such as cropping, resizing, etc.
On the other hand, it’s remarkably opaque, having the concept of an “Album Shelf” onto which albums can be placed. Albums are collections of image files stored in XML, but with a PVM extension. However, there’s no apparent way to actually get PVM files onto an image shelf, so in the event of, say, a hard drive crash, you’ll apparently need to completely recreate any albums you might have had.
This is utterly obnoxious (not to mention unacceptable) so I actually contacted HP support, who told me that there was simply no way to import albums. One can create albums, I reasoned, and list of albums on the album shelf must be stored somewhere, after all.
After much screwing around, while tech support insisted that what I was attempting was impossible, I determined that this was all stored in
C:\Documents and Settings\[windows login]\Local Settings\Application Data\HP\Digital Imaging\db
The file format appears to be Foxpro, and there are a bunch of files in there. Foxpro can open them, but what’s shoved into the text columns appears to be UCS-16. The short version is that copying the database files from one installation to another copies the Album Shelf.
