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Mac OS X  |  Audio / Video  |  Converters  |  PhotoReviewer  |  v. 1.2 crashed during review; will NOT launch without crashing

PhotoReviewer

PhotoReviewer

View and catalog digital photos and generate slideshow.

Version:  2.1

   [ Views: 668 ]

v. 1.2 crashed during review; will NOT launch without crashing

Feedback Type:  Commentary

Contributed by: arfitact_WM Wednesday, May 26 2004 @ 01:28 PM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: NO

Running OS 10.2.8.3 I downloaded and drag-installed PhotoReviewer to my apps folder. After reading a bit I downloaded the PDF-formatted manual as well.

I made sure all prefs were set to do what I wished and to avoid memory overloading, as it warns (I limited it to 9 files and nearly all mine are under 1MB in filesize, so seemed safe). I had first dragged a copy of ALL of my iPhoto libraries, albums, et al into a folder which I had named Review. This way I figured if I did not like or if I misunderstood this app I could always trash everything it produced and would be right back where I started with my iPhoto files untouched.

In running PhotoReviewer I discovered that:
- Some of the features criticized by posters on the web were not as the critics had said (example: the app DOES let you enlarge images to fill the screen, or reduce oversized images to fit - in PREFS).
- When an UNDISPLAYED file is the active/current file one can't see any change if the subsequent file is also UNDISPLAYED, so for a while I thought I was making no progress, until noticing that the filename was advancing as I clicked on NEXT or VETO, etc.
- I could not Move an UNDISPLAYED file to a User-determined folder during a session, so had to give up that step.
- I was nearly finished with 3,800 files when the app crashed with no explanation. The Modified Time of the folders in question indicated that I had lost 52 minutes of constant work in that review session (!!!). I groaned, and relaunched the app.

It asked me for initial setup as at the beginning but once I clicked START it got to a display screen but could not load a single image before crashing. Numerous tries ensued, including Restart, Disk Permissions repair, re-installing, searching for a .plist to trash and rebuild (could find none, and no instructions in Manual!), re-downloading it...

I'm exhausted and have no idea what I did wrong. This is NOT GOOD BEHAVIOUR by an OS X app, $10 or $50 or free. I have to toss it out, with a thumbs DOWN, alas.   

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Comments

1 comments |

An explanation - Ben_Haller_985

As usual, I could have easily helped this user through the problem, but as usual, they never contacted me, instead posting a nasty review without ever trying out my support. Sigh. This is a straightforward problem, and it is Apple's bug, not mine. PhotoReviewer uses the standard Cocoa image engine to read photos from disk. That engine sometimes crashes, and there's nothing PhotoReviewer can do about that. The first image left in this user's review folder was a corrupted file which reliably crashed the Cocoa image engine; removing that file would have fixed the problem. I'm willing to bet the same file would also crash TextEdit, Mail, Preview, and any other app that uses the Cocoa engine. And by the way, this issue *is* mentioned in the user manual. And lastly, modified times of folders are probably not reliable (again, Apple's bug, not mine); PhotoReviewer moves files on disk as they are vetoed or approved, so there is no way to lose an hour's worth of work as the reviewer claims they did. The reviewer was probably just trusting the modification dates for folders, which are not to be trusted (for any app). PLEASE, folks, if you experience a problem with one of our apps, contact us!

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Monday, August 23 2004 @ 07:10 PM PDT