Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Longtime Finder Alias Keyboard Shortcuts Now Mutate Photos

And to top this all off — truly, this is genuinely hard to believe — these ⌘R and ⌘L shortcuts not only break 27-year-old Finder shortcuts, but they aren’t even consistent with Photos, which uses ⌘R for “Rotate Counterclockwise” and ⌥⌘R for “Rotate Clockwise”. So in Photos the R maps to Rotate not Right, and the direction for an image rotated using ⌘R is left/counterclockwise.

[…]

There is some consistency to using ⌘L and ⌘R as shortcuts for “Rotate Left” and “Rotate Right” — those are the same command names and shortcuts that Preview uses. But there’s no reason Preview doesn’t use the same command names and shortcuts as Photos, and Photos’s use of “Clockwise” and “Counterclockwise” is, in my opinion, more clear than “Right” and “Left”.

Brian Gerfort:

Oh shit! So THAT’s why I occasionally find rotated photos on my machine! I’ve been wondering why that happens. And guess what I do constantly every day: Build and run in Xcode (Cmd+R) ..accidentally have a Finder window/desktop with an image file in focus? Boom.

Steve:

The biggest problem with the change is not that command-R no longer reveals but that it rotates photos without any real feedback. I’ve got a ton of rotated photos now. Fuck whoever made this change, and especially didn’t put it in the menu bar so it could be disabled.

You can’t disable it, but you can use System Preferences to assign the keyboard shortcuts to other commands, i.e. back to “Make Alias” and “Show Original”. Then you run into this bug.

Peter Kamb: