When I retired the computer they were on, I saved them to a CD as jpeg files. Presumably because of problems with the hard drive on that computer, the disk would not open on the next computer (an error message indicated they were likely corrupted)which used Microsoft Digital Image. I recently took the old computer into my computer guy and asked him to pull the photos off of it. He burned them to a DVD, but they are now in the .mix format. The version of Digital Image on the newer PC can not open them.

I'm going to be sick if I can't retrieve these photos.

As an aside, I didn't know it was preferrable to save photos as tif rather than jpeg. I have noticed a degradation in image quality over time, and wondered why that was. Does it have to do with the jpeg format?