Thread: Mac users & abusers: Snow Leopard: Trouble opening groups of downloaded files

From MacFixIt, cnet
November 5, 2009

Snow Leopard: Trouble opening groups of downloaded files


Users are reporting a bug in Snow Leopard's Finder that prevents groups of files that have been recently downloaded from being opened at the same time. In a real world scenario this could include downloading multiple images for use in design work or multiple video elements for use in film work, etc. This bug requires users to open each file individually, a limitation that can severely disrupt certain workflows.

After testing these reports on my machine, I was not able to reproduce the problem. However, the issues on the forums (2, 3) seem to affect a large amount of users. As Michael Jones from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) suggests, the issue is essentially that groups of files downloaded may not open all (or any) of the files as a group. He suggests that this is a universal condition of Snow Leopard, though as I stated earlier I could not recreate the situation as described.
This problem seems to be due to a "feature" in Snow Leopard, related to security concerns, that quarantines downloaded files. Much has been made of Apple's noticeable push for better security with Snow Leopard, though this inconsistency with the user experience may cause them to rethink how they handle files downloaded as a group.

Possible workarounds
This thread explains a Terminal-based workaround to get rid of the quarantine label on your files as well as some other workarounds users have discovered. Of course, if users are going to attempt any of these suggestions, be sure you have a stable backup of all your important data. As with many issues we have reported about Snow Leopard, we will track them against the release of 10.6.2 and report on whether they are addressed in the update.

Anyone here expieriencing this? Just yesterday I tried to open a batch of .jpegs in Preview, they did but in several separate windows. The second time, everything was okay.