Level 1

4 points

Rotating pictures in Preview

A co-author and I are writing a book. Research entailed visiting many archives, and photographing pages of cellar books, and of wine catalogues. Naturally enough, pages were photographed in order: at each archive, oldest books first, and within each book the pages from oldest entry to newest.

We have about fifteen thousand pictures, my folder structure on my computer being the same as that on his.

With Snow-Leopard Preview I would go to the folder for that archive, command-A command-O, and all the pictures would open. I could scroll from one picture to the next, either gesturing within the sidebar, or with appropriate keys. About half of all pictures needed rotating, done with command-R. So far, so good. Indeed, so excellent.

Now to my new Mac, a 27" beauty that came with OS Lion. The large screen is to see big pictures at the same time as editing the words of the book. And again, command-A, command-R, and scroll away. Ooooh: that picture is at ninety degrees: command-R. Annoying rhythm-breaking dialog box asks whether I want to unlock it (no, never ever change my original pictures, just never) or duplicate it (or, uselessly, cancel). Duplicate. So now there is a new window with just that picture, rotated. About half of all pictures need rotating, so quite quickly my screen is a disorganised mess of one-picture windows.

I have owned a Mac since 1988: please let this not be Apple’s Mr Clippy moment. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to the Apple store I go. I get some sympathy, and some agreement that for my purposes new Preview doesn’t work well. Suggestion: download the old Preview from somewhere. So to my old Mac, now somebody else’s; archive Preview (and TextEdit); FTP up; back to my machine; FTP down and unpack.

Preview has a long complicated error message, the crunchy bit perhaps being “Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MeshKit.framework/Versions/A/MeshKit”.

(Aside: TextEdit works, which I hoped was great—no more over-writing my files behind my back. Alas the new TextEdit in the applications folder is super-locked and can’t be overwritten.)

Back to Preview. Please, how can I have a bulk open of pictures, in the right order, which are not altered by Preview, which are easily rotated (no dialog box), and which post-rotation remain in the right order? No new files; and no changes to the old (=only) files. Rephrased, Snow-Leopard Preview was really good: please could I have it back?

iMac

Posted on Nov 7, 2011 11:51 AM

123 replies

Nov 24, 2011 12:37 AM in response to jdaw1

jdaw1 wrote:

Have any readers experience of Xee?

Looks good - better than Preview. I think I'll try it for a while. Thanks for the link.

Nov 24, 2011 12:49 AM in response to jdaw1

jdaw1 wrote:

Apple is now big and can make the rules.

I'm only Joe End-user. I don't make the decisions at Apple. But I'm a business-minded person and I'm very interested in management and how decisions get made. So I'm taking a keen interest in what's happening at the top of Apple now that the controlling hand of Steve Jobs has gone.

As was to be expected after a controlling presence has gone, there's a power struggle now and some very strange people are being brought in.

There big question is where Apple is going. Initial decisions already suggest that what was once mainly a computer designer and manufacturer, the best in the world, has put computer development on the back burner and is focussing on handheld devices and the Cloud. Developments in those areas are feeding back into the computer part of the business. Lion is the end result of that. A computer operating system that's being turned into a toy.

Apple can decide whatever it wants, but so can I. And where Apple seems to be going is not where I need to go. It's me that's in control of what I do and where I go, not Apple.

Look how dumb this thin, thin message is. Jeez, it even has a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom. I have tons of screen real estate here, but it's blank and the posts are about 2" wide. That's just another example of the things that Apple is deciding to do.

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2011 1:09 AM in response to Tom in London

Please do post a report on Xee.

I am very annoyed.

Apple has become a phone company. An iPhone has a small screen, a narrow user interface. So an iPhone needs to take decisions for itself; control needs to move from user to OS as there isn’t enough bandwidth for the user to retain all control. OK, fair enough.

But then Apple decided to port this loss-of-user-control back to the Mac. But my Mac isn’t a phone. My Mac has a ≈100-key keyboard, and a modern mouse that includes multiple sensors and clickables. There is bandwidth: I ought to be allowed to choose for myself whether or not to overwrite my original pictures.

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2011 1:11 AM in response to jdaw1

I wrote my post as you were writing, and posted without having seen yours — and our independent conclusions are similar.

Nov 24, 2011 1:19 AM in response to jdaw1

Yes- and suddenly something changed the incredibly narrow display so that it now uses the full width of the window. Another thing that isn't working too well.

Nov 24, 2011 1:25 AM in response to jdaw1

jdaw1 wrote:

Please do post a report on Xee.

Xee will be no good to me if it does Autosave and Versions.

Tony T1

Level 6

10,247 points

Nov 24, 2011 6:44 AM in response to jdaw1

Have any readers experience of Xee?

Xee is also an editor, and while it may not have AutoSave and Versions now, it may in the future.

Search for "image viewer" in the App Store (there are few under Photography).

Here's one that looks like it does what you're looking for:

uPhoto Quick Viewer

uPhoto Quick Viewer is one software that can help you quickly view your photos. You can Slideshow,rotate ,flip,search ,sort,remove,trash , set desktop image elc...

★ Features ★

✓.Easy management

Drag your photos or folders to the specified zone, uPhoto Quick Viewer will open up photos or all files of folder quickly, including its sub folders.

✓.Support JPEG,TIFF,PICT,BMP,GIF,PNG,TGA,SGI,PSD,EXR,JP2 file formate.

✓. Search easily

You can easily find files you need by sorting them or entering full or part of name in “search”field .

✓. Slideshow’s function

Click SlideShow button ,enter slideShow mode

✓. Management function

Select one picture, you can delete it, copy it, enlarge it, narrow it, and flip horizontally or vertically.

Tony T1

Level 6

10,247 points

Nov 24, 2011 6:45 AM in response to Tom in London

Tom in London wrote:

jdaw1 wrote:

Please do post a report on Xee.

Xee will be no good to me if it does Autosave and Versions.

Snow Leopard does not support Autosave and Versions, so you're good-to-go with Xee. (You are boycotting Lion, correct?)

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2011 7:37 AM in response to Tony T1

I recently bought a new 27" Mac, which came with Lion. Nice people in Apple store said that it cannot be downgraded to Snow Leopard, giving a reason that mentioned the PRAM. If you know that to be false then splendid, Snow Leopard it is. But if the Apple store was correct—a reasonable default assumption—then I’m trapped in Lion.

Hence my seeking old versions of Preview. Preview was very good at doing what its name suggested. I liked it. I want it back (that is, the version that asks for permission before changing my files). Have you any old versions?

Nov 24, 2011 8:07 AM in response to jdaw1

jdaw1 wrote:

Have you any old versions?

If you can get hold of a Snow Leopard installation DVD you can get Preview off it using Pacifist

Nov 24, 2011 8:10 AM in response to Tony T1

Tony T1 wrote:

Snow Leopard does not support Autosave and Versions, so you're good-to-go with Xee. (You are boycotting Lion, correct?)

yep but I'm also going to use it in Snow Leopard. It seems better than Preview in some ways (but it seems to have trouble reading PDFs that include text).

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 24, 2011 8:46 AM in response to Tom in London

Tom in London wrote:

If you can get hold of a Snow Leopard installation DVD you can get Preview off it using Pacifist

Alas S-L Preview doesn’t work under Lion. Presumably some OS command has been withdrawn. Maybe Preview from an earlier OS didn’t call the routine that has been removed. Hence my seeking very old Preview.

Yes, a dog’s breakfast.

Tony T1

Level 6

10,247 points

Nov 24, 2011 10:08 AM in response to jdaw1

jdaw1 wrote:

Alas S-L Preview doesn’t work under Lion. Presumably some OS command has been withdrawn. Maybe Preview from an earlier OS didn’t call the routine that has been removed. Hence my seeking very old Preview.

You need to give up on Preview for what you want it to do (or not do)

I just looked at uPhoto Quick Viewer, seems to be exactly what you're looking for.

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 25, 2011 4:56 AM in response to Tony T1

Thank you.

Hopefully the powers at Apple will observe that users are attempting to de-Lion their computers. We can’t de-Lion Preview, so are attempting to find Lion-free alternatives.

The existence of an alternative would not mean that Lion is good. Indeed, the seeking of an alternative is a criticism of Lion.

Again, do distinguish two cases.

• If one does many complicated changes to a small number of files, there might be sense in some type of auto-saving.

• But trivial changes (such as rotation) to many files should not be auto-saved. Or at least it should be possible to disable that auto-saving.

Hopefully this mess will have a shorter life than Mr Clippy.

Nov 25, 2011 5:31 AM in response to jdaw1

I've just gone back and reread jdaw's original post at the top of this thread.

I'm flabbergasted that the task jdaw describes is no longer possible.

None of the posts added to the thread have been able to suggest any way of getting back to jdaw's workflow (which I often use myself, e.g. after I've been out on a photo shoot taking hundreds of pictures, downloaded them all to my Mac, not sure which ones I'll use, just want to look at them quickly, many of them shot in portrait so I need to quickly rotate them)

I can do that quickly in Snow Leopard but it's impossible in Lion.

Even were I to attempt to do it in Lion in the way some people have been describing, each image would take me 4-5 times as long. Say I have 300 images to sift through and my client wants the best ones by tomorrow morning.

I've been out in the cold all day with my camera and it's late. At the best of times it might take me 2 hours to look through the 300 images. Now it's going to take me 10 hours and my computer is going to be a mess, with hundreds and hundreds of Versioned images I didn't want and never will want, and renaming/duplicating all 300 images every time I do anything to any one of them.

In one fell swoop Apple has killed the hand that has been feeding it for most of its life: the visual arts and graphics industry.

Like I said: I'm flabbergasted.

So jdaw - how's the book going?

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Rotating pictures in Preview