macOS hidden finder files not ignored by default

[anarcat]

during the last import, I saw a bunch of those errors:

Impossible de charger les métadonnées depuis ._DSCF1128.JPG
Il n'y a pas de données pour générer le Sous-dossier et nom de fichier pour ._DSCF1128.JPG. Le photo n'a pas été téléchargé.

that's french, sorry. :) Basically, it says it "can't load metadata from ._DSCF1128.JPG" and "there is no metadata to generate the subfolder and filename for ._DSCF1128.JPG. the picture was not downloaded".

it turns out those files are cruft left over by the Mac OS X Finder on my memory card:

[1016]anarcat@curie:101_FUJI$ ll -a {._,}DSCF1218.JPG
-rw-r--r-- 1 anarcat anarcat 4 096 2018-02-10 11:21 ._DSCF1218.JPG
-rw-r--r-- 1 anarcat anarcat 11 856 553 2018-02-10 10:39 DSCF1218.JPG
[1012]anarcat@curie:101_FUJI$ file ._DSCF1218.JPG
._DSCF1218.JPG: AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file
[1017]anarcat@curie:101_FUJI$ strings ._DSCF1218.JPG
Mac OS X
ATTR;
com.apple.lastuseddate#PS
com.apple.quarantine
)w3&
0082;5a7f6249;Preview;
This resource fork intentionally left blank

That happened because I opened the files in a friend's Apple computer before importing them. This is probably what created those files.

I think those files should be ignored. Not sure how that decision could be made, but maybe simply ignoring hidden files would be an elegant and logical solution here.

It's not a big deal, because this happens only in corner cases where I happen to open pictures on a Mac for a preview before importing them as part of my normal workflow. But this freaked me out: I thought there was a hardware problem with the memory card, to be honest. If those images would simply be skipped, the problem would just completely go away and not confuse novice users who have no idea what hidden files or resource forks are (nor should they have to know, really).

Thanks!

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

Rapid Photo Downloader handled the situation as expected: when it encountered a file that was named as a jpg, and it couldn't download it because of missing metadata, it reported an error.

The problem with ignoring all hidden files is that some people might actually want to download them!

If Rapid Photo Downloader is ever ported to macOS, then this will definitely need to be revisited.

[anarcat (anarcat)]

Thanks for your response!

I guess this is why I filed this bug report: I can't imagine why someone, in the normal course of action, would want to download hidden images files. I can't imagine a reasonable use case where such files could be created in the first place...

So yeah, the behavior is fairly reasonable considering the context (foreign files that look weird), but I would argue that ignoring hidden files (or at least making that configurable) would improve usability for those of us who do work across different work environments, while having a minimal impact on the vast majority of other use cases...