Jpegs on WinXP

[Waccoon]

BeOS had metadata.

This can be troublesome if it's done wrong, though.  A good idea on paper but very hard to get right in practice.  If you put the metadata in the file itself, you're basicly just putting on a big header.  If you put it in the filesystem, you're going to get hosed sooner or later.  If you put it in a seperate file, like a ".info", you really need to have a good version control system in place.  I can't tell you how much grief I put up with when moving Mac files between non-Mac computers.

I hated taking newspaper submissions from Mac people who wrote files on PC disks, and wouldn't open when I put them in the Macs in our office.  You can't double-click, and if they are even visible in the file requesters, the applications keep complaining that they are the wrong file format.  Sometimes computers are too smart for their own good.  (Mind you, my experiences are with MacOS 8.5.  God, I HATED that OS!!!)

How does BeOS do it?  I haven't seen a single implementation yet that works on anything but the computer that actually generates the files, which isn't terribly helpful for documents, anyway.

[Waccoon]

Oh yeah, and it's worth noting that most JPEG files are actually JFIF files, which have different headers than EXIF JPEGs.  Technically, the ".jpg" and ".jpeg" extensions are wrong.  :-)

This is noticeable in many programs that expect JFIF formats.  Load up an EXIF from a digital camera, and the picture will either show up blank or crash the program.  We had this problem a lot on our Kodak workstations.  I was furious at Kodak at first, but when I started doing a lot of image recognition in my web scripts, I started to realize just how many different JPEG "standards" are out there -- or really, the lack of them.

Yet another thing we can blame on "extensible" formats.  I prefer an actual standard that doesn't change, because a bad standard is at least a standard.  Metadata can be very, very troublesome, and is usually more marketing hype and feature-pushing than a real help.

[Waccoon]

Legerdemain:  Not saying that ACDSee lacks features, but every time I have installed it I've uninstalled it the same day. I don't know what happened, but a few years ago the application suddenly became waaaay to slow for me to even think about using. It takes forever to startup... and considering it is a applicating mainly for viewing pictures I find that somewhat strange, on border of being ridicilous. It's a shame, really, considering the power it has as an application.

No kidding!  It's only slow when you go into browser mode, though.  I'm still using version 2.21 and refuse to upgrade because of the way they ruined the responsiveness of the app.

I think it started getting slow because of the thumbnail caching features.  Since version 3.0, the app saves thumbnails in your temp folder and manages an internal database.  You can see hundreds of 0-byte files in your temp folder after using it a few times.  Leaving tons of blank files all over the place and never cleaning them up really shows how bad the code has gotten.  I don't know why developers think it's OK to use the temp folder as an archive or cache!  It's called "temp" for a reason.

Then again, if you think ACDSee is slow, you should try out the thumbnail browser built into Photoshop CS.  It's HORRIBLE!!!  Painfully slow, the GUI stinks, and the image quality is bad, to boot.

I use Win2K, Photoshop 5.5, ACDSee 2.21, and won't upgrade any of them.  Funny how everything seems to work fine, and then they start messing with good formulas and ruin everything!

cecilia:  never had a problem like that.

Wierd.  I've had major delays opening the browser mode with versions 3, 4, and 6 on all systems.

In general, image applications tend to be awful with responsiveness, and are really dumb when it comes to image analysis so data can be saved in an appropriate format.  The image libraries I use with my web scripts, GD and Imagemagick, are pretty sucky.  I should write my own, but I don't know much about C.