[X Newbies] Screenshots/Photoshop

[Vincent Cayenne]

At 12:23a -0400 2003.05.13, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:
>I thought Macs were not dependent on document suffixes? Well, pre-OSX.
>
>This is OS 9.0.2.
>
>Curiouser and curiouser.
>
>I think, then, that the reason the photos opened so well on the 
>tower is I changed
>the names to those easier for me to recognize and so they opened right up.

I suspect that the crux of your problems with these files lies with 
this issue. Pre-OS X, the Mac did not rely on the suffixes 
(extensions) because the file metadata was held in the file's 
resource fork in the form of Type & Creator information. So the Type 
may have had PICT or JPEG or TEXT, for instance, while the Creator 
would determine the application that created the document - MSWD, 
XCEL, etc. But files created on a Windows machine would not have this 
data except as indicated by the three letter extension. But the 
Windows extensions were mapped to Type/Creator as handled/shown by 
the PC Exchange Mac control panel. If, as in your case, multiple 
instances of the same file name occasioned renaming by the OS (from" 
xxxx.jpg" to "xxxx.jpg 1"), then the mapping would break and the 
result would be a file that is unrecognisable by the receiving Mac. 
Renaming the files to have relevant extensions allows the mapping to 
work. You could even have changed the mapping so that all .jpg files 
were seen as photoshop files, in which case they would automatically 
open in Photoshop instead of PictureViewer.

OS X will usually recognise and use the Type/Creator metadata but is 
rather more aligned toward support of the file extension mechanism. 
But the file with no Type/Creator data and a ".jpg 1" suffix will 
confuse both pre-OS X and OS X systems.
-- 
'tis as said. [Reality is defined by being described]