Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames

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PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston An undocumented feature of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and related programs makes the applications open b
[See the full post at: Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames]

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rc primak

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This is one reason why I prefer open source software. If you find a bug or Easter Egg like this and want to correct it, you can look into the code, and edit it (or recompile it) and have a fully functional program. Then you can donate your corrected code to the open source community as a fixed version or fork of the software. Proprietary code is opaque and does not offer these options.

And I guarantee a open source project developer will not dismiss bug reports as “it’s you, not me”. Open source developers also rarely refuse to patch older versions. But even if they do, you can always create your own fork.

-- rc primak

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I also use Brian’s formentioned Faststone Image Viewer in combination with Photoshop Elements 2022, and I think it’s a Photoshop (Elements) bug. In my experience this bug occurs with ALL images, whatever the files are named.
Previously I could trigger PSE (i.e. PhotshopElementsEditor.exe)  to open an image from within Faststone Image Viewer, but that does not work anymore. It does trigger PSE to open, but the image does not load.

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rc primak

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Don’t you people remember DOS command lines?  The “S-” is the clue that what follows are commands to perform upon opening the program.  There might be things like “Sharpen” and/or “B&W”  that follow that tell PhotoShop to perform these functions to the files that are named at the end of the line, including series of files like “Vaca*.jpg”… thus open and Sharpen, then convert to Black and White, all files that begin with “Vaca” and end with “.jpg”.

This may be considered a “bug” as a remnant of the old DOS versions of the progrma,but it could also be useful to others as a CMD mode command to perform multiple actions to a series of files.

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rc primak

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I’m with Adobe Quality Engineering and saw the article…

I’ve found the misbehaving code – it’s a long-standing bug that’s, on Windows, in an incomplete way looking for the presence of the command line parameter “-Quit”. Nothing nefarious, just the accidental use of a “substring match” function instead of a “whole string match” function. And as surmised, the code has been shared with other products in the past couple of decades.

Thanks for bringing this up here, Brian. When I see notifications about the disposition of this issue I’ll follow up here, if I can find this thread again.

-Noel

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rc primak, Casey S, Will Fastie

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The issue was not given high priority, so I just changed it myself in the Photoshop source code. As I mentioned above, it was a misrecognition of a debugging test switch embedded in a filename – a minor coding oversight almost 2 decades ago. Look for the change in the Photoshop 2022 version 22.4 release later this year.

-Noel

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wavy

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