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GraphicConverter didn't just trash my files. It walloped them, evaporated them, ate them with milk and sugar and swallowed them whole.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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GraphicConverter vs. brain freeze: Software bug? Sometimes, you have to blame yourself


August 6, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Software is never perfect. As much as I like GraphicConverter, the versatile image manager (and, of course, converter) from Lemke Software (www.lemkesoft.com), I learned to my dismay last week that not even GraphicConverter can be trusted when you do something dumb.
   I had worked all evening on a group of photos using another program, TwilightBrush X, from www.artwerkz.com. I hadn't yet made any backups -- I do that at the end of an evening's photo editing, not during my sessions -- and I ran GraphicConverter to do some batch editing on the images.
   Batch editing means, of course, that you're working on a group, or batch, of files. The latest version of GraphicConverter provides many functions that can be done this way. It's wonderful.
   But not when you shoot yourself in the foot.
   I don't blame GraphicConverter. In the Preferences, plain as the look on my face when I realized I had lost irreplaceable files, there's a setting that asks if you want GraphicConverter to delete all files after it converts them.
   Of course, Murphy (the one responsible for such laws as "Toast Always Falls Buttered Side Down" and "If You Expect the Worst, That's What You'll Get") was right there at my side when I turned that option on.
   Keep in mind that I've noodled around with computers for longer than half of you were ever alive. I've written about how fickle they are for 20 years.
   But the nut behind the wheel -- that's me, folks -- was to blame for checking that little box. What the option said, in all its fateful exactitude, was "Delete source files after conversion." It didn't even have a question mark at the end; it was a declaration, not a query.
   That should have tipped me off. Something should have rattled a little louder in my brain. I should have known that what the option actually meant was this: "Is it OK if I delete the precious, one-of-a-kind image files you slaved over for hours even if I'm not able to convert them?"
   You see the difference?
   You can figure out the rest of the story. Graphic Converter obviously didn't like the nonstandard image files that TwilightBrush X created. It coughed them up without converting them. But it did exactly what it told me (in its own way, to be sure) it would do with them. It deleted them.
   And I don't mean it stuck them in the trash. It walloped them, evaporated them, ate them with milk and sugar and swallowed them whole.
   I don't have a file-rescue utility on my OS X Mac, so they were simply AWOL. I stayed up late downloading a few utilities that claimed they could rescue files that had suffered the same kind of ignominious fate, but the closest I came to rescuing them was a program that worked from a remote server and then told me I could pay a few hundred dollars to get the files back.
   No way. I'm dumb, maybe. But not THAT dumb.
   So I redid the photos, editing them again and making backups as I went along. I still love Graphic Converter and still use it for conversions. I still recommend it to anyone who wants the best single image conversion program for Mac OS X.
   But my recommendation carries a warning: Work on copies, not originals. I should have done that and didn't. Sometimes, the lessons you thought you had learned are the ones you just plain forgot.