Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Damaged how?' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Damaged how?
Authored by: cacheMan on Jan 18, '02 03:22:28PM
Your workaround is interesting and valid. But it just makes me wonder, why would apple go through the trouble of changing the file type if it didn't have a reason. True, iMovie doesn't look as if it is going to damage your photos, but some other app might. I think that the explanation for why they changed the file type might be just as interesting as the workaround.
When Jobs introduced iPhoto, he spent at least a minute talking about how it was important that you didn't somehow throw away or destroy your photos accidentally. It is my belief that this is the reason for the file type change.
Have you noticed that it is a pain to delete a photo from your library? When you change them to JPEGs, can you throw them out more easily?
When you change them to JPEGs what are you really doing?

[ Reply to This | # ]
Damaged how?
Authored by: tknospdr on Jan 18, '02 06:23:43PM

He's not changing them to jpg's, they already are jpg's. What he's doing is adding metadata to the file so that other applications know what to do with it, like ID3 tags for MP3s and such.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Damaged how?
Authored by: cacheMan on Jan 18, '02 07:27:21PM

That is my point exactly, other programs now know what to do with them. Other programs know how to modify jpegs. My hunch is that apple did not make them jpegs on purpose so that other programs didn't modify your photos. This way you have "negatives" that you can always go back to. If you want to play with your photos as jpegs, iPhoto allows you to export them as jpegs. Why else would they not have made them file type JPEG? On accident? I doubt it, these are jpg files we are talking about. I understand what this workaround is talking about, I just don't think that it's a good idea.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Damaged how?
Authored by: Anonymous on Jan 19, '02 01:07:59AM

All right, let's think here people. If Mr. Jobs had really wanted to intentionally "obfuscate" the files' metadata, such that other applications could not as easily "tell" they were indeed jpeg images, don't you think the software might also have gone so far as to remove the more-obvious ".jpg" extensions on the files? At least in my iPhoto library, most of the JPEG files I've imported were simply renamed to xx.jpg, though the type code is stripped off.

An interesting sidenote, however... I have also imported many single-layer photoshop files into iPhoto, and those have all retained their type codes of "8BPS".

I suspect the behavior of iPhoto that everyone is speculating about is not at all intentional, but an unintended side effect of OS X's emphasis on file extension over metadata.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Damaged how?
Authored by: robh on Jan 19, '02 01:44:03PM

Come on, this smacks of a bug in iPhoto (or iMovie's importing routine) rather than a conscious attempt to stop other apps from importing them.



[ Reply to This | # ]