Nikon has posted an updated version of its RAW codec for Windows Vista. Nikon and Microsoft had received reports of compatibility issues that we initially addressed in a previous blog post.

The Fix
The updated codec corrects the incompatibility issues that were previously reported. NEF files that are tagged in Windows Vista using the new codec should be readable by third-party applications, such as Adobe® Photoshop® software. Files that had previously been tagged in the initial version of the codec should also now be readable by third-party applications once they have been tagged on a system with the updated codec installed.

Other Changes
In addition to the fix described above, there are a few other minor changes:

• The download package is now correctly signed.
• A memory leak has been fixed.
• The installer checks OS version before installing, and does not install on the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

Background
The .NEF file format is a proprietary file format defined by Nikon, and incompatibilities can occur when third-parties attempt to reverse-engineer this format. The Nikon codec wrote metadata to the file in a manner which, while technically correct, was unexpected by many third parties. So there was no loss or corruption of data in these files, they simply became unreadable because these applications did not know how to interpret the changes. Applications that relied on the Nikon codec, or otherwise understood how to interpret the contents of the NEF files were not affected. The updated codec writes the metadata to the files in a way which is less prone to confuse other applications.

Get the Fix
The updated codec can be downloaded here. The Photo Gallery update mechanism will also take you to the updated codec. 

- pixblog