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My usual workflow when I scan a text document is to correct colors and play with contract to reduce their file size. However, since I upgraded to Sonoma, I find that whatever image I scan, to whatever format (tried png and jpeg so far) end up creating files that I am totally unable to save after modification, or save as another name, from the Preview app of macOS.

I get this message on Save As:

The document “scan.png” could not be saved as “scan-a”.

And this when I play with the colors and Save:

The document “scan.png” could not be saved.

If anyone knows a fix for this, I would be most grateful, as fixing colors of scanned PNG images reduces their size from 20 MiB to between 1 and 2 MiB. It also helps removing scan artifacts by playing with the contrast.

There seem to be additional macOS permissions happening here (judging from the @ in the permissions), but I don't know much more. In the Inspect window for the file, I don't see it being Locked and the listed privileges for my user are Read & Write.

-rw-r--r--@ 1 adeynack  staff    15M Oct 16 22:37 scan.png
-rw-r--r--  1 adeynack  staff     4B Oct 16 22:40 test.txt

EDIT / Additional Info

Software Used

The software used for scanning the Image Capture, included in macOS.

More Detailed ls

The result of ls -lae@ is as following.

total 29904
drwxr-xr-x  5 adeynack  staff       160 Oct 16 22:40 .
drwx------+ 9 adeynack  staff       288 May 22 21:33 ..
 0: group:everyone deny delete
-rw-r--r--@ 1 adeynack  staff      6148 Oct 16 22:41 .DS_Store
    com.apple.FinderInfo          32
-rw-r--r--@ 1 adeynack  staff  15296080 Oct 16 22:37 scan.png
    com.apple.lastuseddate#PS         16
    com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_djebsaob4taaoilt6jtfvis3ne       121
    com.apple.quarantine          22
-rw-r--r--  1 adeynack  staff         4 Oct 16 22:40 test.txt

Funny, this quarantine metadata that we see there 🤔. However, even after removing it...

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine scan.png

... I still cannot Save / Save As the file.

And the moment I try again to open it in Preview and save it, the quarantine metadata comes back.

Alternatives Tried

The software saves automatically in ~/Pictures/Scan. I tried copying the file over to ~/Downloads and it had the same effect. I tried Duplicate-ing the file from Finder and it still had the same behavior.

Improve this question
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  • What software/hardware are you scanning with? Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 20:54
  • In case the issue is privileges, what is the output of ls -lae@ and the same for the parent folder? Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 5:29
  • What is the filepath of the original scan? Have you tried saving somewhere like your Desktop? Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 14:13
  • @IconDaemon Answered in the EDIT section I just added to the post Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 8:45
  • @benwiggy Answered in the EDIT section I just added to the post Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 8:46

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