Oh, Apple, how you vex me (part 2)
I did manage to sort out the malfunctioning Mail.app by the simple expedient of grabbing a copy of mail from my last backup from poison and stuffing it onto the system (and then running software update a couple of times to pick up any updates to the ancient 10.4 version of Mail.app.) Thunderbird was just not usable, because it was a typically open source piece of craft that made too much of the internal workings of the interface meaninglessly visible, so I was pretty happy to get a Mail.app that didn’t just not want to let me send mail.
But then I discovered a fun feature of iPhoto 11, in that when I tried to export photos it really wanted them to go into the Pictures directory instead of the Documents directory where I wanted them to go. I’d do the export, and up would come the selector pointing to Pictures. Change that to Documents, save the file, and export the next and it would go right back to Pictures.
And, at least according to the commentary I saw on various Apple forums, that’s just how it works and there’s no way to save images anywhere else. I tried to use some other image viewers to take iPhoto’s place, but they were indescribably icky and, worse yet, tended to wipe out all the exif data whenever I manipulated a file.
So how did I solve this? Why, I went to the last backup from poison and copied the older copy of iPhoto from there, then redownloaded the photo directory (because iPhoto 11 changed database formats and I did not discover the stupid export feature until after all 71gb of photos had been converted to the new format :-()
Sigh. I should not have to do this after setting up a new computer!