Yesterday my daughter was playing with her Nintendo 3DS console and then asked me to put in there some pictures I had in the computer.
I thought that should be fairly easy, as the system is provided with a regular SD card and I already copied there some MP3 files which worked successfully.
Well, after connecting the SD card into my laptop, I just started browsing its folders and quickly found some named with the pattern "199NIN03" inside DCIM. They were there: files with JPG and MPO extensions. The latter is actually a twice-JPG, the so-called "3D picture" taken with the console's dual camera.
My first attempt was to create a new directory with the name I'd like and start copying JPG files in there. Unmounted the drive in Linux, put it on the console, start it and go to its photo browser application. Nothing!
Yes, I had previously read the f*cking manual [RTFM], but I've found nothing about transferring pictures from a computer to Nintendo 3DS. Indeed the way back is possible (i.e., to copy files from the console to a PC).
What do we do in these cases? We start gooooogleing! \o/
There were not so much entries, but this post was bulls-eye: http://techforums.nintendo.com/message/33675
"I got my N3DS the day after its release, and I've been enjoying it except there's nothing telling me how to put pictures from a PC to the SD card. I looked around and only found a guide on putting music on my SD card. Help appreciated."
Okey-dokey! That guy is sharing my sufferings. Look what the "expert" user answered:
"Sorry, but there isn't an easy way to transfer pictures from a PC to the 3DS, as the pictures would need to be in the exact same format, size and have all the information on them as if the 3DS had actually taken the picture. And it is the same as with the DSi and XL, so really the only easy work around would be to view the picture on a computer monitor and take its picture with the 3DS. ;)"
OMG, I didn't believe what I've read. To take pictures of the computer screen with Nintendo 3DS? It just can't be true, what a noob's advice!
Now that sounded like challenge for me! :D
My next step was to analyze the files taken with 3DS, as they were perfectly visible in its browsing tool. That's what I realized from the files:
1. they are named with the pattern "HNI_9999.JPG" and "HNI_9999.MPO" (when taken "in 3D")
2. their resolution was 640x480
3. their average size was 50kB
4. they had several fields in JPEG's header: camera make and model, and date/time taken
5. file command gave this output:
HNI_0018.JPG: JPEG image data, EXIF standard 2.2, baseline, precision 0, 4360x480
Then I started hacking around with these f*cking procedures: plug SD card into PC, analyze and copy files, remove SD, plug it into Nintendo 3DS, and... nothing appeared! First I tried renaming folders and filenames according to the patterns the console was expecting. Second I tried to rescale the pictures to 640x480, by using ImageMagick (see my other post):
$ convert -scale 640x480 -quality 85 source/HNI_0018.JPG destin/HNI_0018.JPG
Yet nothing! I wondered the issue was with the JPEG's header. Then I asked Debian's APT for some magical tool designed to handle those cr*ppy header fields... Among several options, I chose jhead. Indeed I found jhead wonderful, so that I could easily manipulate a JPEG's EXIF header from the Linux shell.
When issuing jhead onto the original 3DS file, I had this:
$ jhead HNI_0018.JPG
File name : HNI_0018.JPG
File size : 49610 bytes
File date : 2011:09:08 20:20:09
Camera make : Nintendo
Camera model : Nintendo 3DS
Date/Time : 2011:09:05 14:31:20
Resolution : 640 x 480
So I found an interesting option on jhead: it can copy a JPEG's file header into another file! That's what I did:
$ jhead -te HNI_0018.JPG HNI_0030.JPG
Well, now at least my desired JPEG file had the proper and expected header, right? F*cking cycle again and... nothing! The console was still not recognizing my picture files copied from a PC.
I thought it could be an issue of duplicated timestamps, so I tried to change the file's timestamp (through touch command) and the date/time in JPEG's header (via jhead). No way!
That expert guy in the forum was definitely wrong: even with the proper naming and file formats, the console still does not accept pictures from the outside world! That lock-in stinks like some other company's behavior. Then I turned Nintendo 3DS over looking for some fruit logo on its back! :P
Deep breath. I realized that 3DS was able to save pictures from the Internet browser that comes with the system. Hmmm, that should be a hint! When observing JPEG files taken from Internet, I discovered that they didn't bear those blessed EXIF headers... :P (Well, at least I learned about jhead tool.)
What if I put my own picture files in the Internet and try to access the respective HTML page from 3DS? That's what I did: raised my apache2 service on Linux and pointed the browser in 3DS to my local URL address. After displaying the image, I was able to save it locally in the console! OK, that should be a solution.
Indeed the JPEG was successfully persisted in the proper folder with its preferred name. However, the original file format and EXIM header were kept (I checked it using Linux diff command).
The task of choosing which pictures to import into 3DS I gave to my daughter, but I still needed to make it easier for her. So, in order to display thumbnails rather than Apache's default file listing, I created a small Shell Script:
$ for a in *.JPG *.jpg; do echo "<a href='$a'><img src='$a' border=5 height='25%'/></a><br/>"; done > fotos.html
This was to be run inside each folder containing candidate pictures to be saved into 3DS. In Apache HTTPD's /var/www/ directory I created symbolic links to those directories.
After checking the availability of my local pages from 3DS, I finally returned this gadget to my daughter. Then I taught her how to browse the pages and save the pictures she wanted. She was quite happy for that besides the extended effort.
Wooh, what a lotta work! Life could be easier, isn't it Nintendo?
