5 Replies Latest reply: Jul 17, 2013 5:10 PM by station_two RSS

    Totally misleading error message, FYI only

    station_two Community Member
    station_two Jul 17, 2013 8:41 AM

      The screen shot below shows a patently false error message when attempting to open a 13.3 MB .PICT file in Photoshop 13.0.5 under Lion 10.7.5, while there are clearly over 15 GB of free, unused RAM, and over 500 GB available for scratch.

       

      I'm showing this only to highlight the unreliability of "not enough RAM" error messages that can send a user on a futile wild-goose chase. 

       

      The file is obviously corrupted, as it is the result of a futile attempt to extract any image files in a rescued archive of some sort (from the infamous Webshots by Smile site that recently caused millions of images from thousands of former Premium account holders to be lost).  But there's definitely not a RAM problem here.  Other, healthy files of over 1 GB open without any problem.

       

      Picture 4.png

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        • 1. Re: Totally misleading error message, FYI only
          Chris Cox Adobe Employee
          Chris Cox Jul 17, 2013 10:28 AM (in response to station_two)

          Sometimes OS routines return "out of memory" errors for odd cases, or NULL pointers that result in "out of memory" errors (because that's also what they return when out of memory, and that error is more common for those routines).

           

          But if you can email me the file, I'll see where it's failing and if we can do anything about the generic error message.

          • 2. Re: Totally misleading error message, FYI only
            station_two Community Member
            station_two Jul 17, 2013 2:56 PM (in response to Chris Cox)

            Will do.  Thanks.

            • 3. Re: Totally misleading error message, FYI only
              station_two Community Member
              station_two Jul 17, 2013 3:36 PM (in response to Chris Cox)

              As per your kind suggestion, I've emailed you the corrupted  file.


              Upon checking, the error as per the screen shot               posted in the OP, was being returned by Photoshop 11.0.2 under Tiger 10.4.11 on a PPC G5 Quad with 16 GB of RAM, not Ps 13.0.5 under Lion as erroneously posted in said OP.  The posted screen shot was in fact the correct Tiger one, though.

              However, I copied it over to the Mac Pro, also with 16 GB, and it returns the same Photoshop error under Lion 10.7.5 when set to open in Photoshop 13.0.5.

              When set in the Finder to open with Apple’s Preview.app under Lion, it opens in the latter showing a plainly corrupted image, as shown in this screen shot of the Finder’s preview in column view, and without returning any error:

              Screen Shot 2013-07-17 at 3.18.44 PM.png

              From what I can see, it looks like Preview.app and the Finder are showing the corrupted embedded JPEG preview of a 2005 photo.

               

              Thanks in advance for looking at it.

              • 4. Re: Totally misleading error message, FYI only
                Chris Cox Adobe Employee
                Chris Cox Jul 17, 2013 3:52 PM (in response to station_two)

                Yep, that alert icon says it was CS4.

                 

                In CS4, we still called QuickDraw for complex PICT images.

                And in this case QuickDraw returns a NULL pointer, but no error code.

                So it's either "out of memory" or "program error" for this file, and "out of memory" is the default error for OS APIs that return NULL pointers.

                 

                CS5 and later versions of Photoshop can't even start to open the file because it requires QuickDraw (not just a bitmap).  They report that "the PICT contains data that is no longer supported by this version of Photoshop".

                • 5. Re: Totally misleading error message, FYI only
                  station_two Community Member
                  station_two Jul 17, 2013 5:10 PM (in response to Chris Cox)

                  Thank you.

                   

                  Good to have confirmation that "out of RAM" error messages can be triggered by something else.