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TICKET ARCHIVE -> picture icons change to Quicktime ones

Alancat - Feb 5, 2008 - 2:04 pm

For years I have saved my digital pictures to my system 9 Mac and backup devices and the file icons retain the picture thumbnail.

Now I am transferring my pictures from my camera to iPhoto 2 on my iBook running system 10.4.11.

When I copy or use the export function in iPhoto to put pictures on a flash drive to add to my archive on my system 9 machine, the pictures arrive on the system 9 machine with the Quicktime (or PictureViewer?) icon with each file instead of the thumbnail.

How can I preserve the original state of the jpeg file with its thumbnail?

Thanks for any clues!

Alancat

Serenak - Feb 5, 2008 - 2:42 pm

Hello Alan

thanks for using macosx.com and I think I can at least explain the cause of this if not actually give you a cure.

You see the thing is the difference between X icons and the old OS 9 ones... Classic OS used icons that were basically 32x32 pixel .pict files - icon makers used a lot of tricks over the years to push that format to its limit and make some really nice art in what is actually a very very restrictive format but in the end a 32x32 pixel square is what it is. (And there is a smaller size for the little icons such as appear in the Application Switcher Menu)

OS X doesn't use that format - X icons are much more complex and are up to 128x128 pixels and the format allows for the use of several different sized icons to allow smoother scaling (such as in the Dock or in Finder Windows) and allows for much more complex effects such as transparency and sub pixel anti aliasing (iirc)

Just take a look at something like the Automator Icon up really big... Open the Applications folder set the view to Icons, and set the view options to the max size of 128x128... (use Apple-J) now go in even closer, turn on screen zoom in the Keyboard and Mouse preferences and use the zoom to make the icon REALLY huge on the screen.. see just how beautifully it is constructed.
Also the Quartz rendering is a big part in this - it has a lot of tricks that the older QuickDraw just can't do.

OK Now if you bring a file from OS 9 to X it brings its old Icon with it - X can understand that and Just displays it as it was... it will look exactly the same if you have your windows set to display icons at 32 pixels - but set the view to something bigger and the limitations become obvious. However if you send a file from X to OS 9 the reverse can't be done... the OS doesn't understand the X icon format and can't display it even if it did so it has to attach a "generic icon" usually the basic "document" type for whatever 9 thinks should open that file...

If you really want to have icons on the pictures in an OS 9 archive you will have to import them into 9 separately (or into 9 first and then export them to X afterwards...) or take them to 9 and then open them all and resave them so that they get OS 9 Thumbnails...

Hope that at least explains root of the problem if not actually solving it for you.