I got some photos attached to an email this evening that were HUGE — 1.7 – 2 Mb — and in the course of their being bundled up for transit, being sent, and unbundled, two of them were damaged. Apple’s Preview.app wouldn’t open them. They could be viewed in a browser, so all was not lost: they were recognizable as JPEGs, at any rate.
So I quickly fired up the GIMP in X11, opened them up, resaved as something smaller that 2072 * 1200 or whatever they were, and all is well.
Well, if I like OS X so much, what do I say to the fact that Preview.app — an OS X application — failed to open the files? True enough it did, but OS X, being UNIX and extensible through DarwinPorts, allowed me to run a different set of tools and get me what I wanted.
Not every OS is as easily extended.