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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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technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and
commentaries, continuously available online since
1983
T h e R o a
d L e s s T r a v e l e
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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.
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