Safari: Flags local picture files as open

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 4th, 2003 • 5:54 pm

Safari suffers from a weird flaw that does not affect other browsers as far as I know:

When I am viewing my local copy of a web site that I’ve designed on my hard drive, if the local page that I have currently loaded in Safari contains a picture file, then, behind the scenes, the picture file is flagged by Mac OS X as “open”.

If I then edit my original picture file in Photoshop (typically an uncompressed PSD file), and try to save an optimized copy of it (JPEG or GIF) with the same file name and in the same location as the one currently loaded in Safari as part of the web page it is displaying, then Photoshop tells me that it cannot REPLACE the existing file because it’s “already open in another application”!

If I LOAD a different web page in Safari, the problem disappears.

In other words, the simple fact that a local HTML page with picture files is loaded in Safari flags whatever JPG or GIF picture it contains as “open” in Mac OS X and you cannot REPLACE the file using another application, such as Photoshop.

I have never encountered this problem when editing pictures in a web page and previewing the web page in another browser, such as Internet Explorer. Typically, I would LOAD the page in Explorer, see a problem with a picture it contains, open the original picture file in Photoshop, edit it, save it, save an optimized version of it for the web using Photoshop’s “Save for Web…” command, with the same file name and in the same location as the existing one. Photoshop would ask me if I want to REPLACE the existing one, I would say “yes”, and it would be done. I would then return to Explorer and hit the Reload button to refresh the web page and see what the new optimized version of the picture looks like in the web page.

I cannot do that in Safari. Major bummer!

It doesn’t make sense. Safari should just LOAD the HTML and picture files and render them, and then leave the actual files on the hard drive alone. That’s what its caching system is for.


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