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Just received my weekly copy of the "Ask Woody" newsletter and Gary's question did indeed become a story. I thought I recognized Gary's name and when I flipped through our forum here, I found this thread. Congratulations on being famous, Gary! ______________________________ Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames By Brian Livingston An undocumented feature of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and related programs makes the applications open but fail to load an image — and the apps then close abruptly — if you launch the apps using a filename with specific characters, according to numerous licensed users. This weird behavior, which is either an inadvertent bug or a deliberate Easter egg programmed in by some Adobe developer, can be seen on releases of the software all the way back to Photoshop version 5 (1998) and through Photoshop 23.2.2.325, which is the current version in Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2022. Developers insert secrets into applications all the time I’m not at all interested in whether some obvious bug has survived in Adobe products for more than two decades. All software has bugs. What’s much more interesting is whether some Adobe developer deliberately but quietly inserted a tiny routine — “do not load files that have this name pattern” — as a quick-and-dirty way of preventing co-workers from seeing some files when using Photoshop. Over the years, I’ve found many major software products with undocumented features that departmental managers had no idea their underlings had tucked in. Figure 1. Several versions of Adobe Photoshop and related programs reportedly won’t open images — such as this photo of a colorful Ecuadorian crustacean called a Sally Lightfoot — if the file is named SA-Quito.jpg or something similar, making some users crabby. Photo by Gary Oddi The honor of discovering this particular bug — or feature — goes to a photographer named Gary Oddi. He retired several years ago as an accountant for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As an avid traveler and amateur photo enthusiast, he recently passed through Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and took hundreds of pictures while visiting that country’s scenic Galápagos Islands. (See Figure 1.) To organize his best photos into a slide show, Oddi first used an app named FastStone Image Resizer to give his camera’s randomly titled photos some meaningful names: SA-QuitoGalap-001.jpg SA-QuitoGalap-002.jpg SA-QuitoGalap-003.jpg ... SA-QuitoGalap-400.jpg Oddi’s shorthand obviously served as a memory aid that these photos had been taken during his trip through South America, Ecuador, and Galápagos. But to his surprise, when he right-clicked any of these photos in Windows and selected Open With > Adobe Photoshop, a strange thing happened. The application launched as usual and looked as though it were about to open the image. But unexpectedly, Photoshop immediately shut down, displaying no error message. That’s where the fun of sleuthing begins! It’s not you, it’s Adobe Photoshop and its siblings I won’t bore you with the details of exhaustive tests that have been performed on Photoshop. We can thank the active members of the PTE Forum (a discussion group for users of PTE AV Studio editing software) and the PATACS user group (Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society in Fairfax, Virginia). To make a long story short, numerous techies were able to reproduce Oddi’s findings and discover some additional ones: There’s nothing wrong with the JPEGs. The testers could rename any JPEG file to match the above character pattern. Photoshop would immediately exit after trying to load any such image. It happens with Adobe products other than Photoshop. An administrator of PTE AV Studio’s user forum confirms that the error occurs on Photoshop Elements, also known as PSE (the less-expensive, lightweight cousin of Photoshop, aka PS). The bug isn’t caused by a Windows flaw. Testers reported the Photoshop problem on various versions and builds of Windows. The error occurs with numerous variations of the “jinxed” filenames. The AV studio admin reports that giving a JPEG file a filename as short as SA-Quito.jpg causes the same problem that Oddi’s longer spellings do. Oddi himself additionally confirmed that the “A” isn't necessary. For example, the filename S-QuitoGalap-001.jpg (omitting the “A”) generates Photoshop’s same “abort” behavior. By the way, if you ever have trouble with an image — perhaps Photoshop complains of “a problem parsing the JPEG data” — you can test the file or fix it by following the steps in a Repairit article. I was able to reproduce the “abort” problem myself. I simply launched a licensed version of Photoshop Elements using Open With and a perfectly good JPEG file I’d named S-Quit.jpg. The app unceremoniously closed itself mere seconds after displaying its splash screen. Oddly, Photoshop’s disappearing act is case-sensitive. The app immediately closed when the filename was s-Quit.jpg but not when it was s-QUIT.jpg. Of course, I’m just a sample of one, which isn’t significant, so I bow to the superior testing abilities of the forum users mentioned above. Is it a bug or a feature? Some Adobe developer probably knows. This brings us to the heart of the matter. Is this a bug that Adobe hasn’t fixed for years, or is it a feature that some Adobe developer inserted, choosing an uncommon filename string? If it’s a bug, here’s where it might live. Methinks the filename fragment -Quit is being read by Photoshop and its siblings as a command to exit. That would be a pretty bad job of input validation, but I’ve seen worse in billion-dollar software suites. If it’s a feature, don’t bother looking for a coder named Quito Galap. Causing the app to abort if a filename begins with a string “that no one would ever use” — S followed by a hyphen (-) followed by Quit — might have seemed like a clever privacy measure to someone inside the Photoshop environment. As I mentioned above, finding this problem’s exact cause isn’t the point of this column. Of much greater interest to us is the habit of developers coding into commercial software various cool features that never get mentioned in the “help” file. As I reported in the May 3, 2021, AskWoody Newsletter, I’ve raised the ire of some upstanding Windows users just by revealing various secret keystrokes developers quietly inserted into the classic Solitaire game. (For example, users may be able to evade the usual draw-three rule.) How many more secret features are just waiting out there for us to discover? Adobe tech support can’t find the problem Oddi and other testers reported Photoshop’s aborting problem to Adobe tech support. The group received an official reply on March 22, 2022, from tech-support representative Tina Carter: I do not believe that this has anything to do with Photoshop 2022. I’m sorry — I still believe this has something to do with your files, etc. Also, please keep in mind that earlier versions of our apps are not tested on new versions of the operating system — so that’s not supported either — and could be causing the issue as well. That response raises the most important questions of all: Let’s say Adobe becomes convinced that the problem exists. Would the company decline to issue a patch for people who paid for a “perpetual license” to Photoshop? Millions of people purchased lifetime licenses for Photoshop prior to 2017, when Adobe switched the app solely to a cloud-based monthly subscription (Wikipedia article). What about people who bought Photoshop Elements? This simplified version of Photoshop has always been sold with a perpetual license, and Adobe still sells it that way. (Currently, PSE is even a so-called Amazon’s Choice.) Would Adobe make a patch for them? The company’s website says of Photoshop: “Adobe provides technical support and security fixes for the current version and the prior version. Bug fixes are only provided for the current version.” Check Adobe’s Legacy page for information on your particular Photoshop version. To be sure, it isn’t the biggest problem in the world if an app aborts when a filename happens to contain an uncommon string of characters. You have easy workarounds for this issue, which I describe below. Much more important is the ethical question of how a software corporation should support users who paid a company’s asking price and now need patches for security flaws and other really serious bugs. Adobe tech support did not reply to requests for comment for this column. However, a source within the company says at least one employee was, in fact, able to duplicate the problem on PS CC 2022. Adobe has not posted a bug report as of this writing. Simple solutions for simple problems — just don’t expect security To put it mildly, if a developer deliberately made Photoshop and its siblings abort when images’ filenames start with something like S-Quit, let’s just say that isn’t a good way to secure images and keep people from seeing them. Figure 2. Oddi is converting more than 10,000 slides, including his Galápagos photos, into JPEGs. He considered it preferable to use a projector and camera he already owned rather than paying a commercial conversion service. Source: Gary Oddi Facebook page There are many easy ways you can open an image — even in PS and PE — if you run into a problem with any such file not opening: If Photoshop is already running, you can open an S-Quit file with no problem. It’s only when you start Photoshop by double-clicking a JPEG — or you start the app using Windows’ Open With menu item — that the app exits before displaying the image. An image may open just fine if lowercase letters are in the filename. As testers have noted, simply changing the Q to lowercase — i.e., S-quit.jpg — makes Photoshop open and display such a JPEG normally. Other image-editing programs may be able to open a tricky JPEG. Even the free tools in Windows, and others that can be downloaded from the Web, may be able to open images that Photoshop tells you it cannot parse. On the other hand, what if you truly don’t want strangers to be able to open and view your files? Attorneys, for instance, are required to keep potential corporate mergers confidential. For true security, compress the files into a ZIP or similar format and use a long, strong password. Use a password manager or keep a written record of your passwords locked away — not written on a sticky note that’s glued to your monitor. Photoshop’s “launch then immediately exit” behavior is one of the strangest quirks I’ve seen lately. But I’m sure there are many, shall we say, more entertaining undocumented features out there. If some app has a cool trick that can be used only by those who know the secret handshake, tell me all about it, using the email address below. Thanks in advance!