32 ms·

Apple Photos app corrupts images

1214 points by pattyj 1y ago

ChrisRR 1y ago
I feel like this is a URL that I don't want in my history
- dcchambers 1y ago
  Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.
  - privatelypublic 1y ago
    Something something Railed.
    - MonkeyClub 1y ago
      Nah that's just a one off
- copperx 1y ago
  Why? It's brilliant.
  - brulard 1y ago
    The URL might be mistaken for some different content?
    - k8sToGo 1y ago
      Well, then don't browse from the church computer
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    What's brilliant about it? What's the reference, for those of us unfamiliar?
    - rhgraysonii 1y ago
      It is simply hilarious to make grown adults visit a website called tender love making dot com (a sexual reference) to read a very specific and niche blog about technology.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - sombragris 1y ago
        "tender love making" and then the specific URL mention photos and corruption... it could look really bad!
        meterogue 1y ago
        You are welcome not to visit it if you do not want to hear from a Rails contributor for over 10 years.
        sombragris 1y ago
        Of course. I have no issues with that but I acknowledge that it could be funny.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - meterogue 1y ago
      The author's name is tenderlove. He has been a famous contributor to Ruby and Rails for at least 10 years. If this is objectionable to you, it shows your lack of expertise.
      - 1y ago
  - kotaKat 1y ago
    ZScaler gets pissed off going to frame.work just because of a “malicious TLD”. I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.
    - account42 1y ago
      Sounds like a problem between you and ZScaler (and possibly whoever forces you to use that crap) but not something that anyone else should care about.
- macintux 1y ago
  In the late 90s my then-wife was watching over my shoulder one day and saw the domain “freshmeat.net” pop up as a possible auto-completion in my address bar. She was justifiably suspicious until I showed her it was just a software distribution site.
  - devnullbrain 1y ago
    Infohazard warning: C++ reference is one of these.
    - Y_Y 1y ago
      See also: Experts Exchange, Pen Island
      - eru 1y ago
        There was also a website for a mole station, but I'm not sure if that one was satire.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - efreak 1y ago
        Isn't pen island intentional though?
  - layer8 1y ago
    And she wasn’t suspicious of amazon.com? ;)
- coldtea 1y ago
  As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!
- sholladay 1y ago
  There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time. https://gearspace.com/ https://gearspace.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/gearslutz_is_changing_its_name_to_gearspace/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Ha ha, I remember that name.
  - omnibrain 1y ago
    Modwiggler changed name around the same time.
    - pimlottc 1y ago
      From what to what?
      - iosonofuturista 1y ago
        Original name: muffwiggler
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    I guess the reason why modern times feel so bland is because we all agree on the lowest common denominator, and then celebrate that as "iNcLuSiViTy". If anything you do has any personality, aka deviates from the standard workflow, it immediately gets a disadvantaged position on the free market. It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.
    - jrajav 1y ago
      Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh? Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...
- sgopalan98 1y ago
  Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?
- yard2010 1y ago
  This reminds me of a flash games website from 2007. The domain was something like sogay.com. one time I had to spell it to my father. He asked if I'm sure before pressing enter lol
- United857 1y ago
  I’m old enough to remember arXiv being hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory under the domain xxx.lanl.gov. It’s understandable why they changed their name.
- xyst 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - ChrisRR 1y ago
    I feel like you're the kind of person who can't recognise a joke
- moritonal 1y ago
  This person is a nice person, who's published a huge amount of positive work into the Ruby community. I do wish however they'd change their name from the perspective of a figurehead in the community, we have code referencing their repos and it's just awkward with interns to explain.
  - lloeki 1y ago
    Why would a person need to conform to some uniform grey norm to be able to contribute in any capacity? Ruby's community has been all sorts of whimsy and quirky over the years. I very much enjoy Tenderlove being the community figurehead he is as is: kind, empathetic, genuine, open-minded, and generally wholesome. > it's just awkward with interns to explain. I've never had any trouble talking about Aaron Patterson a.k.a Tenderlove to coworkers, interns or otherwise.
- therein 1y ago
  There is also PenIsland.net. I think there was also a .com that featured a big shop but they seem to have moved.
theturtle 1y ago
iPhoto still works just fine, and I refused to move. And I never have it or anything else be the only place an image exists. Storage is cheap.
- bapak 1y ago
  > iPhoto still works just fine I wouldn't say that out loud. Apple's motto with software is move slow, break backwards compat anyway.
LeoPanthera 1y ago
Changing the end of this headline to "corrupts some images imported from external cameras" would be longer but a lot less clickbaity.
jamesgasek 1y ago
The recent degradation of Apple software quality is crazy
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tamimio 1y ago
For transferring files (photos or others) from iOS, I have been using Landrop for a while and never had any issues so far, it’s also way faster than using a cable.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  I always wonder about the motivation behind these polished, high-quality programs on the App Store which are not open source, and also don't collect (much) data, neither have ads in them.
  - tamimio 1y ago
    It’s open source, else I wouldn’t recommended it https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop I used it along with another called Localsend, but the later one gave me a bit of headache and crashed while transferring some large files last time I used it, but still great as an alternative too, and it’s open source as well. Edit: Actually, you are correct, it seems they did close it! Try localsend instead.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      Love LocalSend. Can be a bit finicky but for quick transfers between systems I love it. Use it so my work laptop, Linux gaming PC, and iPhone can easily pass staff around.
      - k8sToGo 1y ago
        You figured out how to teleport people through local send?
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Coming Eventually:TM:
- basejumping 1y ago
pvdebbe 1y ago
[flagged]
- DRW_ 1y ago
  Why?
sitharus 1y ago
I hadn’t dug that far in to it, thanks for sharing! I assumed my rather old SD card or the adapter I keep stuffed at the bottom of my bag was the issue as I’ve only seen it on a couple of photos. I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years. I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  Well, it might even be a bad sector in RAM or SSD somewhere. Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.
billyjobob 1y ago
He says the checksums are different but he doesn’t provide a diff to show how different. It could just be a single flipped bit or something. And that could happen in his own RAM/disk/CPU/router so seems premature to immediately blame Apple.
- mobilemidget 1y ago
  "I’ve not seen any file corruption when importing to Darktable, so I am convinced this is a problem with the Photos app." Yes this argument is a bit unconvincing for me. Not saying Apple photos doesn't corrupt his files, but this is not real proper investigating either.
- jsw97 1y ago
  He switched out his laptop.
- asksomeoneelse 1y ago
  Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too. That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.
- tenderlove 1y ago
  Here you go! https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b I ran both files through xxd then diffed them. I've literally changed every piece of hardware (at no small cost). "premature to immediately blame Apple" seems a bit off.
  - daemin 1y ago
    This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish my Binary Diff Tool was already completed, but unfortunately I'm still working on it. Can't tell much what's wrong with the differences in the bytes without knowing what the structure behind it is.
  - 1y ago
deviation 1y ago
It seems to be an import pipeline bug. Photos does a lot of extra work on import (merging RAW+JPEG pairs, generating previews, database indexing, optional deletion), so my guess is a concurrency bug where a buffer gets reused or a file handle is closed before the copy finishes. Rare, nondeterministic corruption fits the profile.
- tenderlove 1y ago
  This is also my guess. It's really a bummer, and I'd report it to Apple but since it's nondeterministic I have no idea how to provide repro steps.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain. They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it. I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them. It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company. I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.
    - deviation 1y ago
      Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's. I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
      - dmd 1y ago
        Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!") (Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
outsideoftime 1y ago
[dead]
lapcat 1y ago
See also the Image Capture bug from several years ago where it appends a ton of empty data to imported photos: https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html (I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)
- iamshs 1y ago
  Image Capture did me dirty once. Macbook ran out of space while importing photos but it never stopped and kept on deleting photos from my iPhone. Lost 5K photos of a wedding... submitted a bug and hopefully it has been rectified.
  - ValentineC 1y ago
    Image Capture hasn't had a delete after import checkbox for a few versions now, I think.
itake 1y ago
Apple corrupted images on my iPhone where I can’t import them to my PC via photos, but I can backup the whole phone. They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(
- alterom 1y ago
  Yeah, that's one of the billion reasons I'm sticking to Android phones with gasp file managers and shock expandable storage via an SD card slot. I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    But files are hard, scary and dangerous! What if a scammer asks Grandma to open the files app or copy photos directly to her pc!?
- o_nate 1y ago
  I had a similar issue recently. I used the Windows Photo app to import & delete photos from my iPhone. When it finished, I realized that a significant fraction of the photos had been corrupted. Not sure where in the pipeline it happened, or if they were already corrupted on the phone.
smeeger 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amelius 1y ago
[flagged]
- reaperducer 1y ago
  This is what you get when you buy consumer hardware. And when your Toyota breaks down, we'll all be there to tell you that you should have bought a military-spec truck.
- rollcat 1y ago
  Where can I get professional-grade toothpicks?
  - amelius 1y ago
    Ask your dentist?
hk1337 1y ago
> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos". What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?
- bayindirh 1y ago
  I also use RAW+JPG. Latter part allows quick sharing without long post-processing, esp. for impatient friends. If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.
- basisword 1y ago
  JPG so you can also see the default camera processing which might be work well from time to time. RAW in case it doesn't.
- merelysounds 1y ago
  > What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant? You get to keep out of camera jpg files. Some people might like how their camera processes jpg files and might also want the raw file for a scenario when a more complex editing is needed.
  - hk1337 1y ago
    Interesting, based on this and other replies, it sounds like Photos App should have an option to select what to import? i.e. RAW or jpg, but not both. It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?
    - tenderlove 1y ago
      As I said in my blog post, it imports both and combines them in the UI. Also as I said in my blog post, I switched to shooting only in raw, and it still exhibited file corruption.
      - 1y ago
asolove 1y ago
I also have an OM System camera (OM-5) and never get corruption this bad but occasionally got one row of green pixels at the bottom of a photo during import to Photos. I thought I was crazy, but this motivates me to change up my routine and check if it was Photos all along.
- BrtByte 1y ago
  Never thought to suspect Photos itself
CtrlAlt 1y ago
I’ve never had this bad of corruption. But not surprised. Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import. Good sleuthing!
dzink 1y ago
Not sure if related but importing images via image capture on mac to the disk of the mac gives you correct time when the photo was taken in the file (kind of important if it’s family photos). But if you import it to a usb drive you get current time as creation time for each file so you’ve lost any timestamp you had on the photos.
- mystifyingpoi 1y ago
  > kind of important if it’s family photos Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.
  - ValentineC 1y ago
    Apple's Migration Assistant messed up timestamps when I did a M2 > M4 copy recently. Dropbox doesn't seem to keep timestamps properly either. I like using filesystem timestamps to sort through things in Finder, and thankfully I like A Better Finder Attributes for being able to batch copy EXIF data into timestamps. [1] https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.html https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.ht...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ValentineC 1y ago
  > Not sure if related but importing images via image capture on mac to the disk of the mac gives you correct time when the photo was taken in the file (kind of important if it’s family photos). Something related: exporting originals from Photos used to give the current timestamp back in Ventura, which annoyed me to no end. They fixed that bug in either Sonoma or Sequoia (I jumped straight from Ventura to Sequoia).
- renewiltord 1y ago
  I had this with some old photos but you can quickly rsync preserving metadata and then use exiftool to fill in the time and the whole thing will always work. After that I pasted it in Google Photos and it’s correctly in the timeline. Remarkable how easy this stuff is these days with LLM.
kokey 1y ago
Fortunately it mentions early on in the article that this is related to an Olympus camera so I'm guessing this has something to do with the OM system's flavor of Olympus's proprietary ORF format.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  This would not surprise me. For whatever reason, ORF files from the TG-4 import fine, but CoreRAW doesn't handle the TG-6, so I need to either use RAW+JPEG or convert to DNG.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 1y ago
> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec
- xd 1y ago
  Bit of context. Deleting after import is unlikely to have zero'd out the data on the SD - so using photorec would have allowed them to quickly and easily recover their pictures from the SD card.
  - account42 1y ago
    Not "easily" as the filenames and metadata that associates them with the file contents would have likely been overwritten. Also, not sure how well photorec works with Olympus' RAW files.
huflungdung 1y ago
[dead]
bluSCALE4 1y ago
I have Apple Photos but I never thought to use it to automatically import my photos and clean it up. My process is very similar to where you've ended up. Thanks for validating it--I'll never change it.
tmountain 1y ago
I shoot RAW but I wouldn't want to eat up all my iCloud space with my RAW files. They're 80MB each off of my Fujifilm camera. I store them on a local DAS instead. Curious what the real use case is for storing RAW on iPhoto.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  Backups on the go. 2TB iCloud + wifi + sd card reader for iPhone. No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups
- josephg 1y ago
  You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple. There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
doodaddy 1y ago
As an Olympus shooter this is good to know. But good gravy that troubleshooting path got expensive real fast. Replacing the laptop and the camera? Why not start by trying something other than Photos? It doesn’t even need to be a paid product; the Olympus software is free not to mention a good baseline since it - of all the applications - should be able to import photos without corrupting them. Edit to add: delete on import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.
- vitaflo 1y ago
  Or stop using the camera to connect to the Mac and just take out the SD card and use a reader like most other photographers do.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  My first thought was “software troubleshooting is a lot cheaper than hardware troubleshooting!” Maybe the author isn’t bound by the same economic realities as some of us are accustomed to.
- in_cahoots 1y ago
  Yeah, after you've had this problem once it seems you'd uncheck delete after import before buying a literally entirely new photography system.
  - philsnow 1y ago
    Or just treat the SD cards as write-once and keep buying new ones
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    My workflow is don't delete after import but format the card in the camera afterwards. I have XXXL cards and it is not such a problem if I forget to format. I had one case where I screwed up a shoot and thought file corruption might have been involved (it wasn't) Even though I had formatted the card with the camera and shot maybe 5 test shots I was able to recover most of the images with Disk Drill https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html which has both Windows and Mac versions and looking at a sample of them confirmed it wasn't corruption, it was user error.
bichiliad 1y ago
Somewhat tangental, but I keep my music in the Music app. Wireless music sync is great and usually does what I need. Once in a blue moon, however, it'll absolutely scramble every album cover of every song I have.
mcflubbins 1y ago
I had a weird issue with at least one photo in Apple Photos recently (possibly more that I haven't found) where the photos app showed the image, but I couldn't export it - like it was only a preview. I've upgraded my photos database over many release so I don't know if that's a part of it, the photo in question was from 2018 or so
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  See if you can File->Duplicate Photo it first.
spuz 1y ago
It would be very helpful to document the version number of the Photos app that demonstrates this behaviour so anyone else who is affected can use this article to keep track of potential fixes.
mcflubbins 1y ago
What are some good Open Source / Self Hosted alternatives to Apple Photos (Desktop)? I pretty much keep my Mac Mini around solely to import photos from our phones, free up space on the phone, and backup the Photos DB. We like to go back and look at old photos from time to time too, and the feature that shows them on a map is a big one for us. Last time I looked (pre-COVID) there wasn't a lot of promising options, and some didn't support HEIF images
- rwky 1y ago
  I'm fond of digikam https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/ it's simple enough for most users and has complex features for more advanced users its open source cross platform and doesn't do some weird rearranging of files so you can still use your file browser too.
  - mcflubbins 1y ago
    This looks pretty cool, I'll take a closer look at this one, thanks!
- tom1337 1y ago
  Immich could solve what you are looking for. It supports wireless upload to the server, everything is stored locally and it has some neat additional features. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
  - mcflubbins 1y ago
    Looks pretty cool, this might be the ticket. Thanks!
- sodality2 1y ago
  Immich.app, with their import from iCloud CLI command to seed it: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command
  - 1y ago
internetdrew 1y ago
...just discovered DarkTable because of this! #win
maz1b 1y ago
I stopped using the Photos App on Mac because of this, has happened on several occasions.
kevwil 1y ago
WTF is that URL? I'm NOT clicking on that. LOL
myshkin5 1y ago
I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem but I have to say that there’s a pattern here. Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe from others but a terrible job of keeping it intact. From music libraries with song titles that got switched to long integers to this (and I’m sure more that I’m not remembering atm) they need to do a better job here. Sure security is important but integrity is too.
- montebicyclelo 1y ago
  I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    You should’ve put an airtag on them first.
    - cwmoore 1y ago
      Yes, two or three to make sure.
  - big_toast 1y ago
    I don't really get the syncing situation with apple. And it's really hard to tell when they've resolved bugs in one app or introduced new ones elsewhere. The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - skylurk 1y ago
    I'd love to know how they CRDT hand-written notes.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
MarkMarine 1y ago
I’ve been seeing this happen on older photos that had imported properly, and I just use my iPhone and view photos on my Mac and iPhone. Looking back, I’ve lost whole chunks of my photo library. It’s a bigger problem than I realized. I don’t have these backed up elsewhere.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera. I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.
- tomalbrc 1y ago
  You work in IT right? always backup
  - bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
    How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.
    - account42 1y ago
      The solution to that is rolling backups with different tiers. 1 backup updated daily every week you update the weekly backup every month you update the monthly backup every year you update the yearly backup and so on or with whatever precise timings make sense for you Keep at least the last two snapshots for each. Also, do use error correction codes so you can recover partially damaged backups.
  - MarkMarine 1y ago
    Are you kidding? I pay for iCloud as a service, 30$ a month for my family. I expect it to work and not corrupt my photos.
jcbe 1y ago
I have tried fairly persistently to make Apple Photos my primary photo management tool and I finally gave up recently. The app crashes repeatedly when I have it open—only occasionally until this year but the frequency has increased to the point that it no longer feels usable. A real shame. I’d rather stay in the ecosystem if I had the choice.
Retinal7467 1y ago
This is really good to know. I’ve never personally run into this problem despite having the same hardware because I only ever put the final jpeg into apple photos and keep the camera output completely outside of the Apple ecosystem on a hard drive.
larusso 1y ago
Back in 2011 I did the grave mistake of updating my iPad to the beta version of iOS. It was iOS 4 I believe. I took it with me on my honeymoon travel in US. My use case was to offload images onto the iPhotos app with an SD adapter. I bought the Apple Dock one. On day 7 or so the import failed and all files on the pad got corrupted. But also the SD card got corrupted. I stopped using the device and the card because I knew not all is lost. I had to buy a new card in SF as replacement. Back home I used a recovery software to check if data is still on the card (I used the same software before on a card that got deleted by another person and I was able to get all images back). I was able to get most of the images recovered and also recovered a few from the iPad. All in all I lost maybe 10 out of a few 100. Now I travel with multiple cards and backup already each night while in the hotel. And I don’t delete the images on the SD Card. I format only when I’m sure I have everything copied and secured.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lo_fye 1y ago
Have you tried importing them using the Image Capture app on iOS, instead of the Photos app? It just gets them off the camera/SDCard and onto your Mac in a folder, which you can then drag onto Photos.app -- worth a shot.
roc856a 1y ago
Your workflow was horrendous, and now it's merely bad. Don't touch any images on the card until you're sure that the images imported correctly AND your local and cloud backups have backed up the images. I assume you have local and cloud backups. If not, you should set them up right away. Really, cards hold a huge number of images and there should be no rush to empty them out.
- hosteur 1y ago
  That the workflow could be better does not really excuse the software corrupting the images. This is like the "you are holding it wrong" type excuse.
  - concinds 1y ago
    This bug is clearly Apple's fault, but no matter which software or OS you switch to, you'll encounter a bug eventually and you'll be glad to have a workflow that is resilient to that.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      With Microsoft, you have to be very creative.
- kramer2718 1y ago
  Yeah it really amused me that he went through tons of steps, buying lots of new hardware, etc before simply unchecking the delete images box.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    You also shouldn't delete from the SD card using your laptop anyway. Always use the in-camera format. This was a bad workflow from the beginning, no idea why you would ever click "Delete after import" when importing directly off an SD card. Also a good idea to copy to multiple locations when importing. When I do professional work and import into Lightroom from SD card I have it set to create two copies - import to my external SSD (the "working" copy) and also copies the files to my NAS (which is then backed up to the cloud). Nowhere in that process do I ever delete anything.
driggs 1y ago
I've not experienced corruption like the author, since my workflow involves copying the raw files from sdcard to harddrive, and then importing into Photos. After processing the raws in Photos, I export a .jpg back out to the filesystem. That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted. The Photos app crashes not infrequently.
- goalieca 1y ago
  Photos uses sqlite. I came across this but haven't tried them yet. https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries
  - grgergo 1y ago
    There is also osxphotos for macOS. https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
- ValentineC 1y ago
  > That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted. It's a folder that acts like a file. Right click > Show Package Contents works, and there's an "originals" folder that should have all your photos in normal everyday files.
  - driggs 1y ago
    Instead of being organized by album, they're all thrown together with the filenames as UUIDs instead of the original name, or any useful name whatsoever. The editing steps I've applied to the raw files are, of course, not present. The important parts are all stuffed into a single giant .sqlite file, it looks like there may be other shared resources as well. The point is that - from a data safety standpoint - it would be better if all of the internal metadata were persisted per album, if not per photo. That way one corrupted file would only affect a small subset, rather than causing me to lose the whole library.
hosteur 1y ago
I am not letting Apple Photos touch my photos. Neither Google Photos, etc. All my photos are managed using Digikam and developed using Darktable. They are also visualized via immich, but immich only has access via a read-only mountpoint. Everything is hosted locally of course.
- tehlike 1y ago
  I am moving this direction, but for now as a redundancy purpose. Copied google take out into immich, who has its mountpoint use truenas iscsi backed by zfs. Zfs is set to take snapshots frequently.
  - luke-stanley 1y ago
    Just a warning, I don't think that ZFS snapshots are sufficient for ZFS bitrot protection. Ensuring ZFS has at least 2 copies on physically separate disks and using scrub frequently is the way, right? Please correct me if I am wrong HN!
    - tehlike 1y ago
      Right, zfs snapshots are for the case myself, or any of the software i use (e.g. immich) messes up something.
cmurf 1y ago
The default behavior for handling cards containing images is a read-only mount, and copy all the images without any modifications. When flash fails it returns garbage or zeros instead of (what was) your data. It can be tranient or persistent. And without any error codes from the storage device or the file system. If storage returns garbage for filesystem metadata, all bets are off how the OS filesystem driver will behave. Reformat should be done in camera. And that card used only in that camera. And only that camera gets to write to that card. And don't delete individual images.
tehlike 1y ago
Past few days, i created a copy of all my photos on google in my nas. This gave me a peace of mind in case something catastrophic happens (image corruption, account getting banned etc)...
locao 1y ago
I'm feeling dumb, but that seems a really different RailsConf than I was expecting.
VeejayRampay 1y ago
for context, the author is Aaron Patterson of Ruby and Ruby and Rails fame, a proficient C programmer and overall hacker, he knows his stuff
yard2010 1y ago
> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. I learned the hard way to never delete photos from the SD. Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway. Great article by the way, sounds like my kind of rabbit hole :)
- anon1395 1y ago
  > Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway Not a good idea, you are going to have piles and piles of SD cards that will be hard to manage, and you will burn through $$$.
  - sgammon 1y ago
    people have catalogued and tracked physical items for centuries without issue; a 1TB SD card is now $75 and can store perhaps a year worth of photos
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    I do the same (though not for personal photos, only for my professional wedding work). SD cards are small, I have a stack in a safe. Every professional/paid client I shoot for, I do on new SD cards. I have dual slot cameras, so one card just permanently lives in my camera and gets formatted between shoots, the other I treat as a one-time use card. Doesn't eat into my margin too much, and I appreciate the extra redundancy when dealing with someone else's wedding photos, so that if somehow something went catastrophically wrong with the rest of my back up process and off sites, at the very least I still have the SD card with the RAWs on it.
    - dkga 1y ago
      Gosh I hoped all wedding photographers thought to do the same...
      - thewebguyd 1y ago
        You'd be surprised. I've seen and heard some real horror stories. My $dayjob is IT/infrastructure ops, so backup hygiene is engraved in me as a core value. A shocking amount of people outside of tech have no concept of backups or redundancy.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Imagine having the resources of Apple and not testing your software. We deserve better.
pandemic_region 1y ago
> Bought a new laptop Bought a new camera: the OM System OM-1 MKii I think he was just looking for an excuse to buy new kit
aakkaakk 1y ago
This bug has been there for years, probably a decade. I got similar symptoms as mentioned, I suspected AFS+, but what do I know. It has happened on at least 3 iphones (pros), now when I think about it, I don’t remember any iphone I haven’t have troubles with. Having 5000+ images (non-raw) where 5-10% are corrupt is infuriating, but I just stupidly buy another iphone every year (the most expensive one). Re-importing images 10-100 times could sometimes extract a few additional images, but the phone just disconnects after a while when running such scripts.
hn111 1y ago
I remember years ago I lost some random videos on iCloud (synced via the Photos app). The filenames were there but they couldn't be opened anymore and seemed corrupt. Since then I never trusted iCloud anymore and switched to Syncthing (which back then also messed up some of my data if I recall correctly) and then Nextcloud.
spike021 1y ago
I realize it's easy to think or assume this is a bug affecting everyone but for what it's worth, I've had zero issues importing photos from my Sony a6000 and a7iii for the past eight or so years. Tens of thousands of photos at this point. For the longest time my process while traveling was importing onto my iPad or occasionally my iPhone since I didn't have a personal laptop, just a Mac Mini at home.
ImPrajyoth 1y ago
It feels less of security related and and more of ecosystem lock-in related to be honest
renewiltord 1y ago
Use photorec to recover from the old SD card even if you deleted Then for the current files you’ll want to see what happened. Often with this class of problem either the bytes are zeroed or shifted. Since the size is the same, perhaps they’re zeroed or perhaps bytes are LE to BE or dumb shit like that (don’t know why it would be but weird world right). Just diff and see if you see anything (I wrote off memory but you get the idea) diff -aui <(xxd -r file1) <(xxd -r file2) If files are getting zeroed sucks but otherwise maybe you can swizzle it back out. If full bytes look weird, look at binary representation and see if you have pattern. From that bare start you can see what’s up.
reboot81 1y ago
Im interested to see if you encounter the same with a different phone. Most probably a software issue, but are we sure it isnt something defective with your phone?
- ericye16 1y ago
  My read of the article is that they were importing photos from their camera to their laptop, so there's no phone involved anywhere here.
anArbitraryOne 1y ago
It comes back to my fundamental philosophy that apple is the problem and we should abandon it until it shapes up
BrtByte 1y ago
Kind of horrifying. You expect Photos to be dumb and slow, sure, but corrupting files
- BonoboIO 1y ago
  Dumb, slow, corrupt That describes 2025 too
xlii 1y ago
I feel it's OM camera issue. I've been importing raws for years from Sony and earlier from Pentax and didn't experience it. In fact searching for "OM image corruption" shows bunch of results not related to Apple Photo. My guess is that OM has buggy SD driver which starts deletion before actual read finished.
- luke-stanley 1y ago
  I ran into the same corruption issue without any sort of RAW images and without using OM camera. My partner was pissed at me, thinking it was my fault. But it turns out that Apple Photos is to blame!
- borisgolovnev 1y ago
  But OP says they tried different SD card readers. And, now that Macbooks have SD card readers and every desktop dock and type c dongle thing has one, who even uses the camera to transfer photos?
poolnoodle 1y ago
Apple just isn't as good at software anymore. The same thing can be said for almost any big software company, though. Generally QA seems to really not be a priority anymore.
- a96 1y ago
  Never has been. But seems they've managed to do some effective PR if people think they were.
elliotec 1y ago
Always count on Tenderlove for a detailed technical deep dive! I've missed your blog. Tangential story - 12-13 years ago I was a burgeoning and super eager software dev that moved to Seattle to be closer to "the scene." tenderlove's content was a major reason for me going there and I poured through his posts learning way too much about Nokogiri, Active Record, and much much more. I went to every Ruby meetup I could get to out there and I remember one in particular, a Seattle RB meetup, in the Substantial office. It was a pretty small group, at most 15-20 people. I was with a coder buddy but knew nobody else. We were all just drinking pints of Manny's beer and eating pizza from Big Mario's or something. Ryan Davis (the creator of minitest among other things) was doing a presentation on Unicode. Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) was cracking jokes at every opportunity. At one point I asked a relatively naive question and Aaron _tenderly_ answered in joke-form response. I felt such a _part_ of the scene then. Aja Hammerly was super engaged in the presentation, I think even Ryan Bates and/or Geoffrey Grosenbach were there. It was quite surreal to be in this dream-like state around giants and heroes just doing what they were doing and being so inclusive. It seemed so normal but became a core memory. Thanks for everything Aaron, you've truly been an inspiration!
amatecha 1y ago
Wow, I wonder if the same issue exists in the "Image Capture" app which I've used for years on my old MacBook to transfer photos off my iPhone. I would transfer everything off and occasionally find that some photos are inexplicably corrupted. The app itself is terrible, it regularly shows it imported an image but didn't, or it arbitrary imports a couple images completely randomly NOT from the ones I selected, so I end up with weird duplicates and stuff. :\
CharlesW 1y ago
"I don’t know if this is a problem that is specific to OM System cameras, and I’m not particularly interested in investing in a new camera system just to find out." A better way to have further narrowed down the problem down to Actually iPhoto would've been to do the same tests with a USB-C card reader plugged directly into the Mac, which would've eliminated cables, hubs, and camera hardware/software/firmware as possibilities. It's worth noting that searches show that OM-1 USB support is imperfect, the camera manual addresses that "USB transfers aren’t guaranteed in some setups", and user consensus seems to be to use a card reader for reliable file transfers.
- chiefgeek 1y ago
  This. I work as a professional photographer. Nikon shooter. I only ever import directly from my camera in very rare cases. And when I have a problem importing directly from card to Lightroom, first step is to copy everything to the hard drive and import from there.
  - softfalcon 1y ago
    Yeah, seconded. For all cameras of all brands, pop the SD card out and into a reliable reader (I recommend Lexar and Sony hubs). Never use the camera over USB, the experience is terrible on everything from Canon to Sony to Panasonic to Fuji. Don't fight it, just buy that $30 USB hub and get on with your day.
    - girvo 1y ago
      Exactly. I'm no longer even a semi-pro photog, but these days I even just plug in a USB-C SD reader into my iPhone and upload them that way, it's quite nice really. No corruption yet for me, but I only shot a thousand photos on my trip to Italy, and few other than that these days!
      - k310 1y ago
        Fortunate. I remember when an SD card reader would NOT work on an iPhone, and yet the same device and iOS on the iPad would work. Obviously on purpose. I’m an old Unix guy. Files are files. Card to computer. Process later.
otterdude 1y ago
Apple is the new dogshit. Having serious issues with nearly every one of their offerings. Apple TV app needs to be logged in every time. iTunes plays video/audio out of sync. hardware failures on macbook pro / apple watch. I've stopped buying apple stuff
trevorkoob 1y ago
I've stopped using photos entirely due to import bugs. So much wasted time, now I just use image capture to import and organize directly. Still get errors from time to time. Apple needs to hire more quality control, their software integration is going from a positive to a negative. Seamless integration was a large part of Apple's initial hook, and continues to be a part of their drive to push services, it should be a priority.
dkga 1y ago
Curiously, to me at least the image of the corrupted file was itself corrupted and not shown by my browser. Or maybe Apple didn't want me to see the corrupted file... :)
nothrowaways 1y ago
Apple photos also distorts photos. It makes all celebrity selfies look they were driving in the UK.
imagetic 1y ago
Photos has always corrupted stuff.
wormius 1y ago
And Absolute Apple Photos app corrupts images absolutely. (sorry not sorry)
dbg31415 1y ago
The headline should really note that this only affects people importing from a digital camera. For the 99.999% of us who just use our phone, nothing to worry about. Scared me for no reason! =P
drnick1 1y ago
You couldn't pay me to go back to using anything made by Apple or Google. I use a GrapheneOS Pixel and my self-hosted "cloud" with Nextcloud, HomeAssitant, and my own email server and the control and performance are unrivaled by any of the Big Tech crapware. I could start self-hosting an AI chatbot I suppose, but these do not seem to have reached the point of enshiffication yet as relatively new services.
- abustamam 1y ago
  It may be a bit pedantic but Pixel is made by Google. I know you de-Googlefied it by using Graphene but it's still running on Google hardware. I wonder if there are any viable alternatives though.
  - drnick1 1y ago
    You could use a Linux phone, but that would almost certainly mean worse hardware and/or worse compatibility with Android programs (emulator). But for all intents and purposes, when running Graphene Google has no power over you and can't enforce arbitrary bans on sideloading, call recording, etc.
  - sfRattan 1y ago
    I assume GP comment is referring to their software, especially cloud-deployed software, which can change under your feet like quicksand. Hardware, once assembled and in your hands, is yours to a higher degree than that. Eventually each Pixel phone will stop getting firmware updates, but Google has guaranteed 7 years of updates for the newest models. For the future, Graphene OS devs have stated publicly that they're working with an unnamed hardware vendor to develop a phone that will meet their list of hardware requirements. Currently only the Pixel line does. From what I understand, a few Samsung phones come close, but don't support bootloader re-locking... When you unlock Samsung bootloaders it burns out a fuse on the board which in turn completely disables Knox, their architecture for a trusted execution environment.
    - drnick1 1y ago
maipen 1y ago
In the age of AI, apple should just open source these basic apps. They really don’t have anything to lose if they this.
zahirbmirza 1y ago
I have had raw files on an CF card that were corrupted by an import attempt. I never used iOS import again unless the card was backed up to a computer first. Recently, importing via image capture has resulted in recurrent crashes. Files appear on Image Capture that do not appear on the iPhone, nor can they be downloaded via image capture, or deleted. I wish I knew wtfudge was going on.
stmw 1y ago
"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2011-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...
zenmac 1y ago
Noticed that quite bit on old backups of large libs. Being just using Image Capture and backing up to filesystem!!! HD is probably a better medium time backup than some proprietary photo app.
mulmen 1y ago
I recently bought a house and the seller included some slides from when he bought the house in 1993. They are still clear and visible, even without a projector. I highly doubt I will be able to share my iCloud photos in 2057.
ByteDrifter 1y ago
I’m not a pro, but I use iCloud Photos to back up everything. This bug honestly makes me nervous. If something gets corrupted and I don’t even notice I might lose years of memories without knowing.
- Obscurity4340 1y ago
  Might want to have some redundancy for that just in case. I would never trust them for something as important as that
- a96 1y ago
  That really is not a backup. You should store things in files (disk images or archives) and media that you control and can checksum. And which you know you can recover from without relying on any service, company, or download being available in the future. Make sure to replicate before the media rots and have redundant copies. That way, digital data can be kept unchanged indefinitely.
intrasight 1y ago
So restore your original images.
watersb 1y ago
iTunes plays audio files. It also has metadata for the audio: Artist, Title, album art, how many times a song has played... It writes the metadata into the audio file. Badly. In particular, it's that "Play Count": iTunes rewrites the audio file every time you play the song. Usually it just corrupts the metadata enough to forget the album art. But it's perfectly willing to destroy the audio data.
pikuseru 1y ago
“It just works”
mjankowski 1y ago
wait, it wasn't doing that already?
dchftcs 1y ago
People should stop using the Photos app. It is an application designed to lock you in first, make your life hard second, and manage your photos a far third. If photos are important to you, you should never ever put the master copies in an opaquely-managed proprietary container. It prevents you from auditing your files easily, it also prevents you from making backups in other media. Photos isn't even useful; leaving the photos as files allows you to pick multiple tools to manage them better.
tonixx 1y ago
[dead]

1214 points by pattyj 1y ago

ChrisRR 1y ago

I feel like this is a URL that I don't want in my history

dcchambers 1y ago
Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.
- privatelypublic 1y ago
  Something something Railed.
  - MonkeyClub 1y ago
    Nah that's just a one off
copperx 1y ago
Why? It's brilliant.
- brulard 1y ago
  The URL might be mistaken for some different content?
  - k8sToGo 1y ago
    Well, then don't browse from the church computer
- crazygringo 1y ago
  What's brilliant about it? What's the reference, for those of us unfamiliar?
  - rhgraysonii 1y ago
    It is simply hilarious to make grown adults visit a website called tender love making dot com (a sexual reference) to read a very specific and niche blog about technology.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - sombragris 1y ago
      "tender love making" and then the specific URL mention photos and corruption... it could look really bad!
      - meterogue 1y ago
        You are welcome not to visit it if you do not want to hear from a Rails contributor for over 10 years.
        sombragris 1y ago
        Of course. I have no issues with that but I acknowledge that it could be funny.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - meterogue 1y ago
    The author's name is tenderlove. He has been a famous contributor to Ruby and Rails for at least 10 years. If this is objectionable to you, it shows your lack of expertise.
    - 1y ago
- kotaKat 1y ago
  ZScaler gets pissed off going to frame.work just because of a “malicious TLD”. I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.
  - account42 1y ago
    Sounds like a problem between you and ZScaler (and possibly whoever forces you to use that crap) but not something that anyone else should care about.
macintux 1y ago
In the late 90s my then-wife was watching over my shoulder one day and saw the domain “freshmeat.net” pop up as a possible auto-completion in my address bar. She was justifiably suspicious until I showed her it was just a software distribution site.
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  Infohazard warning: C++ reference is one of these.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    See also: Experts Exchange, Pen Island
    - eru 1y ago
      There was also a website for a mole station, but I'm not sure if that one was satire.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - efreak 1y ago
      Isn't pen island intentional though?
- layer8 1y ago
  And she wasn’t suspicious of amazon.com? ;)
coldtea 1y ago
As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?
- cluckindan 1y ago
  Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!
sholladay 1y ago
There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time. https://gearspace.com/ https://gearspace.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/gearslutz_is_changing_its_name_to_gearspace/ https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Ha ha, I remember that name.
- omnibrain 1y ago
  Modwiggler changed name around the same time.
  - pimlottc 1y ago
    From what to what?
    - iosonofuturista 1y ago
      Original name: muffwiggler
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  I guess the reason why modern times feel so bland is because we all agree on the lowest common denominator, and then celebrate that as "iNcLuSiViTy". If anything you do has any personality, aka deviates from the standard workflow, it immediately gets a disadvantaged position on the free market. It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.
  - jrajav 1y ago
    Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh? Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...
sgopalan98 1y ago
Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?
yard2010 1y ago
This reminds me of a flash games website from 2007. The domain was something like sogay.com. one time I had to spell it to my father. He asked if I'm sure before pressing enter lol
United857 1y ago
I’m old enough to remember arXiv being hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory under the domain xxx.lanl.gov. It’s understandable why they changed their name.
xyst 1y ago
[flagged]
- ChrisRR 1y ago
  I feel like you're the kind of person who can't recognise a joke
moritonal 1y ago
This person is a nice person, who's published a huge amount of positive work into the Ruby community. I do wish however they'd change their name from the perspective of a figurehead in the community, we have code referencing their repos and it's just awkward with interns to explain.
- lloeki 1y ago
  Why would a person need to conform to some uniform grey norm to be able to contribute in any capacity? Ruby's community has been all sorts of whimsy and quirky over the years. I very much enjoy Tenderlove being the community figurehead he is as is: kind, empathetic, genuine, open-minded, and generally wholesome. > it's just awkward with interns to explain. I've never had any trouble talking about Aaron Patterson a.k.a Tenderlove to coworkers, interns or otherwise.
therein 1y ago
There is also PenIsland.net. I think there was also a .com that featured a big shop but they seem to have moved.

theturtle 1y ago

iPhoto still works just fine, and I refused to move. And I never have it or anything else be the only place an image exists. Storage is cheap.

bapak 1y ago
> iPhoto still works just fine I wouldn't say that out loud. Apple's motto with software is move slow, break backwards compat anyway.

LeoPanthera 1y ago

Changing the end of this headline to "corrupts some images imported from external cameras" would be longer but a lot less clickbaity.

jamesgasek 1y ago

The recent degradation of Apple software quality is crazy

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tamimio 1y ago

For transferring files (photos or others) from iOS, I have been using Landrop for a while and never had any issues so far, it’s also way faster than using a cable.

actionfromafar 1y ago
I always wonder about the motivation behind these polished, high-quality programs on the App Store which are not open source, and also don't collect (much) data, neither have ads in them.
- tamimio 1y ago
  It’s open source, else I wouldn’t recommended it https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop I used it along with another called Localsend, but the later one gave me a bit of headache and crashed while transferring some large files last time I used it, but still great as an alternative too, and it’s open source as well. Edit: Actually, you are correct, it seems they did close it! Try localsend instead.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    Love LocalSend. Can be a bit finicky but for quick transfers between systems I love it. Use it so my work laptop, Linux gaming PC, and iPhone can easily pass staff around.
    - k8sToGo 1y ago
      You figured out how to teleport people through local send?
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        Coming Eventually:TM:
basejumping 1y ago

pvdebbe 1y ago

[flagged]

DRW_ 1y ago
Why?

sitharus 1y ago

I hadn’t dug that far in to it, thanks for sharing! I assumed my rather old SD card or the adapter I keep stuffed at the bottom of my bag was the issue as I’ve only seen it on a couple of photos. I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years. I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.

itopaloglu83 1y ago
Well, it might even be a bad sector in RAM or SSD somewhere. Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.

billyjobob 1y ago

He says the checksums are different but he doesn’t provide a diff to show how different. It could just be a single flipped bit or something. And that could happen in his own RAM/disk/CPU/router so seems premature to immediately blame Apple.

mobilemidget 1y ago
"I’ve not seen any file corruption when importing to Darktable, so I am convinced this is a problem with the Photos app." Yes this argument is a bit unconvincing for me. Not saying Apple photos doesn't corrupt his files, but this is not real proper investigating either.
jsw97 1y ago
He switched out his laptop.
asksomeoneelse 1y ago
Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too. That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.
tenderlove 1y ago
Here you go! https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b I ran both files through xxd then diffed them. I've literally changed every piece of hardware (at no small cost). "premature to immediately blame Apple" seems a bit off.
- daemin 1y ago
  This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish my Binary Diff Tool was already completed, but unfortunately I'm still working on it. Can't tell much what's wrong with the differences in the bytes without knowing what the structure behind it is.
- 1y ago

deviation 1y ago

It seems to be an import pipeline bug. Photos does a lot of extra work on import (merging RAW+JPEG pairs, generating previews, database indexing, optional deletion), so my guess is a concurrency bug where a buffer gets reused or a file handle is closed before the copy finishes. Rare, nondeterministic corruption fits the profile.

tenderlove 1y ago
This is also my guess. It's really a bummer, and I'd report it to Apple but since it's nondeterministic I have no idea how to provide repro steps.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain. They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it. I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them. It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company. I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.
  - deviation 1y ago
    Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's. I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
    - dmd 1y ago
      Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!") (Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)

outsideoftime 1y ago

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lapcat 1y ago

See also the Image Capture bug from several years ago where it appends a ton of empty data to imported photos: https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html (I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)

iamshs 1y ago
Image Capture did me dirty once. Macbook ran out of space while importing photos but it never stopped and kept on deleting photos from my iPhone. Lost 5K photos of a wedding... submitted a bug and hopefully it has been rectified.
- ValentineC 1y ago
  Image Capture hasn't had a delete after import checkbox for a few versions now, I think.

itake 1y ago

Apple corrupted images on my iPhone where I can’t import them to my PC via photos, but I can backup the whole phone. They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(

alterom 1y ago
Yeah, that's one of the billion reasons I'm sticking to Android phones with gasp file managers and shock expandable storage via an SD card slot. I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.
- freedomben 1y ago
  But files are hard, scary and dangerous! What if a scammer asks Grandma to open the files app or copy photos directly to her pc!?
o_nate 1y ago
I had a similar issue recently. I used the Windows Photo app to import & delete photos from my iPhone. When it finished, I realized that a significant fraction of the photos had been corrupted. Not sure where in the pipeline it happened, or if they were already corrupted on the phone.

smeeger 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago

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amelius 1y ago

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reaperducer 1y ago
This is what you get when you buy consumer hardware. And when your Toyota breaks down, we'll all be there to tell you that you should have bought a military-spec truck.
rollcat 1y ago
Where can I get professional-grade toothpicks?
- amelius 1y ago
  Ask your dentist?

hk1337 1y ago

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos". What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

bayindirh 1y ago
I also use RAW+JPG. Latter part allows quick sharing without long post-processing, esp. for impatient friends. If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.
basisword 1y ago
JPG so you can also see the default camera processing which might be work well from time to time. RAW in case it doesn't.
merelysounds 1y ago
> What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant? You get to keep out of camera jpg files. Some people might like how their camera processes jpg files and might also want the raw file for a scenario when a more complex editing is needed.
- hk1337 1y ago
  Interesting, based on this and other replies, it sounds like Photos App should have an option to select what to import? i.e. RAW or jpg, but not both. It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?
  - tenderlove 1y ago
    As I said in my blog post, it imports both and combines them in the UI. Also as I said in my blog post, I switched to shooting only in raw, and it still exhibited file corruption.
    - 1y ago

asolove 1y ago

I also have an OM System camera (OM-5) and never get corruption this bad but occasionally got one row of green pixels at the bottom of a photo during import to Photos. I thought I was crazy, but this motivates me to change up my routine and check if it was Photos all along.

BrtByte 1y ago
Never thought to suspect Photos itself

CtrlAlt 1y ago

I’ve never had this bad of corruption. But not surprised. Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import. Good sleuthing!

dzink 1y ago

Not sure if related but importing images via image capture on mac to the disk of the mac gives you correct time when the photo was taken in the file (kind of important if it’s family photos). But if you import it to a usb drive you get current time as creation time for each file so you’ve lost any timestamp you had on the photos.

mystifyingpoi 1y ago
> kind of important if it’s family photos Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.
- ValentineC 1y ago
  Apple's Migration Assistant messed up timestamps when I did a M2 > M4 copy recently. Dropbox doesn't seem to keep timestamps properly either. I like using filesystem timestamps to sort through things in Finder, and thankfully I like A Better Finder Attributes for being able to batch copy EXIF data into timestamps. [1] https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.html https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.ht...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ValentineC 1y ago
> Not sure if related but importing images via image capture on mac to the disk of the mac gives you correct time when the photo was taken in the file (kind of important if it’s family photos). Something related: exporting originals from Photos used to give the current timestamp back in Ventura, which annoyed me to no end. They fixed that bug in either Sonoma or Sequoia (I jumped straight from Ventura to Sequoia).
renewiltord 1y ago
I had this with some old photos but you can quickly rsync preserving metadata and then use exiftool to fill in the time and the whole thing will always work. After that I pasted it in Google Photos and it’s correctly in the timeline. Remarkable how easy this stuff is these days with LLM.

kokey 1y ago

Fortunately it mentions early on in the article that this is related to an Olympus camera so I'm guessing this has something to do with the OM system's flavor of Olympus's proprietary ORF format.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago
This would not surprise me. For whatever reason, ORF files from the TG-4 import fine, but CoreRAW doesn't handle the TG-6, so I need to either use RAW+JPEG or convert to DNG.

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giancarlostoro 1y ago

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec

xd 1y ago
Bit of context. Deleting after import is unlikely to have zero'd out the data on the SD - so using photorec would have allowed them to quickly and easily recover their pictures from the SD card.
- account42 1y ago
  Not "easily" as the filenames and metadata that associates them with the file contents would have likely been overwritten. Also, not sure how well photorec works with Olympus' RAW files.

huflungdung 1y ago

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bluSCALE4 1y ago

I have Apple Photos but I never thought to use it to automatically import my photos and clean it up. My process is very similar to where you've ended up. Thanks for validating it--I'll never change it.

tmountain 1y ago

I shoot RAW but I wouldn't want to eat up all my iCloud space with my RAW files. They're 80MB each off of my Fujifilm camera. I store them on a local DAS instead. Curious what the real use case is for storing RAW on iPhoto.

_aavaa_ 1y ago
Backups on the go. 2TB iCloud + wifi + sd card reader for iPhone. No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups
josephg 1y ago
You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple. There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

doodaddy 1y ago

As an Olympus shooter this is good to know. But good gravy that troubleshooting path got expensive real fast. Replacing the laptop and the camera? Why not start by trying something other than Photos? It doesn’t even need to be a paid product; the Olympus software is free not to mention a good baseline since it - of all the applications - should be able to import photos without corrupting them. Edit to add: delete on import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.

vitaflo 1y ago
Or stop using the camera to connect to the Mac and just take out the SD card and use a reader like most other photographers do.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
My first thought was “software troubleshooting is a lot cheaper than hardware troubleshooting!” Maybe the author isn’t bound by the same economic realities as some of us are accustomed to.
in_cahoots 1y ago
Yeah, after you've had this problem once it seems you'd uncheck delete after import before buying a literally entirely new photography system.
- philsnow 1y ago
  Or just treat the SD cards as write-once and keep buying new ones
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  My workflow is don't delete after import but format the card in the camera afterwards. I have XXXL cards and it is not such a problem if I forget to format. I had one case where I screwed up a shoot and thought file corruption might have been involved (it wasn't) Even though I had formatted the card with the camera and shot maybe 5 test shots I was able to recover most of the images with Disk Drill https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html which has both Windows and Mac versions and looking at a sample of them confirmed it wasn't corruption, it was user error.

bichiliad 1y ago

Somewhat tangental, but I keep my music in the Music app. Wireless music sync is great and usually does what I need. Once in a blue moon, however, it'll absolutely scramble every album cover of every song I have.

mcflubbins 1y ago

I had a weird issue with at least one photo in Apple Photos recently (possibly more that I haven't found) where the photos app showed the image, but I couldn't export it - like it was only a preview. I've upgraded my photos database over many release so I don't know if that's a part of it, the photo in question was from 2018 or so

JKCalhoun 1y ago
See if you can File->Duplicate Photo it first.

spuz 1y ago

It would be very helpful to document the version number of the Photos app that demonstrates this behaviour so anyone else who is affected can use this article to keep track of potential fixes.

mcflubbins 1y ago

What are some good Open Source / Self Hosted alternatives to Apple Photos (Desktop)? I pretty much keep my Mac Mini around solely to import photos from our phones, free up space on the phone, and backup the Photos DB. We like to go back and look at old photos from time to time too, and the feature that shows them on a map is a big one for us. Last time I looked (pre-COVID) there wasn't a lot of promising options, and some didn't support HEIF images

rwky 1y ago
I'm fond of digikam https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/ it's simple enough for most users and has complex features for more advanced users its open source cross platform and doesn't do some weird rearranging of files so you can still use your file browser too.
- mcflubbins 1y ago
  This looks pretty cool, I'll take a closer look at this one, thanks!
tom1337 1y ago
Immich could solve what you are looking for. It supports wireless upload to the server, everything is stored locally and it has some neat additional features. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
- mcflubbins 1y ago
  Looks pretty cool, this might be the ticket. Thanks!
sodality2 1y ago
Immich.app, with their import from iCloud CLI command to seed it: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command
- 1y ago

internetdrew 1y ago

...just discovered DarkTable because of this! #win

maz1b 1y ago

I stopped using the Photos App on Mac because of this, has happened on several occasions.

kevwil 1y ago

WTF is that URL? I'm NOT clicking on that. LOL

myshkin5 1y ago

I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem but I have to say that there’s a pattern here. Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe from others but a terrible job of keeping it intact. From music libraries with song titles that got switched to long integers to this (and I’m sure more that I’m not remembering atm) they need to do a better job here. Sure security is important but integrity is too.

montebicyclelo 1y ago
I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)
- eptcyka 1y ago
  You should’ve put an airtag on them first.
  - cwmoore 1y ago
    Yes, two or three to make sure.
- big_toast 1y ago
  I don't really get the syncing situation with apple. And it's really hard to tell when they've resolved bugs in one app or introduced new ones elsewhere. The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- skylurk 1y ago
  I'd love to know how they CRDT hand-written notes.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

MarkMarine 1y ago

I’ve been seeing this happen on older photos that had imported properly, and I just use my iPhone and view photos on my Mac and iPhone. Looking back, I’ve lost whole chunks of my photo library. It’s a bigger problem than I realized. I don’t have these backed up elsewhere.

kccqzy 1y ago
I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera. I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.
tomalbrc 1y ago
You work in IT right? always backup
- bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
  How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.
  - account42 1y ago
    The solution to that is rolling backups with different tiers. 1 backup updated daily every week you update the weekly backup every month you update the monthly backup every year you update the yearly backup and so on or with whatever precise timings make sense for you Keep at least the last two snapshots for each. Also, do use error correction codes so you can recover partially damaged backups.
- MarkMarine 1y ago
  Are you kidding? I pay for iCloud as a service, 30$ a month for my family. I expect it to work and not corrupt my photos.

jcbe 1y ago

I have tried fairly persistently to make Apple Photos my primary photo management tool and I finally gave up recently. The app crashes repeatedly when I have it open—only occasionally until this year but the frequency has increased to the point that it no longer feels usable. A real shame. I’d rather stay in the ecosystem if I had the choice.

Retinal7467 1y ago

This is really good to know. I’ve never personally run into this problem despite having the same hardware because I only ever put the final jpeg into apple photos and keep the camera output completely outside of the Apple ecosystem on a hard drive.

larusso 1y ago

Back in 2011 I did the grave mistake of updating my iPad to the beta version of iOS. It was iOS 4 I believe. I took it with me on my honeymoon travel in US. My use case was to offload images onto the iPhotos app with an SD adapter. I bought the Apple Dock one. On day 7 or so the import failed and all files on the pad got corrupted. But also the SD card got corrupted. I stopped using the device and the card because I knew not all is lost. I had to buy a new card in SF as replacement. Back home I used a recovery software to check if data is still on the card (I used the same software before on a card that got deleted by another person and I was able to get all images back). I was able to get most of the images recovered and also recovered a few from the iPad. All in all I lost maybe 10 out of a few 100. Now I travel with multiple cards and backup already each night while in the hotel. And I don’t delete the images on the SD Card. I format only when I’m sure I have everything copied and secured.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

lo_fye 1y ago

Have you tried importing them using the Image Capture app on iOS, instead of the Photos app? It just gets them off the camera/SDCard and onto your Mac in a folder, which you can then drag onto Photos.app -- worth a shot.

roc856a 1y ago

Your workflow was horrendous, and now it's merely bad. Don't touch any images on the card until you're sure that the images imported correctly AND your local and cloud backups have backed up the images. I assume you have local and cloud backups. If not, you should set them up right away. Really, cards hold a huge number of images and there should be no rush to empty them out.

hosteur 1y ago
That the workflow could be better does not really excuse the software corrupting the images. This is like the "you are holding it wrong" type excuse.
- concinds 1y ago
  This bug is clearly Apple's fault, but no matter which software or OS you switch to, you'll encounter a bug eventually and you'll be glad to have a workflow that is resilient to that.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    With Microsoft, you have to be very creative.
kramer2718 1y ago
Yeah it really amused me that he went through tons of steps, buying lots of new hardware, etc before simply unchecking the delete images box.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  You also shouldn't delete from the SD card using your laptop anyway. Always use the in-camera format. This was a bad workflow from the beginning, no idea why you would ever click "Delete after import" when importing directly off an SD card. Also a good idea to copy to multiple locations when importing. When I do professional work and import into Lightroom from SD card I have it set to create two copies - import to my external SSD (the "working" copy) and also copies the files to my NAS (which is then backed up to the cloud). Nowhere in that process do I ever delete anything.

driggs 1y ago

I've not experienced corruption like the author, since my workflow involves copying the raw files from sdcard to harddrive, and then importing into Photos. After processing the raws in Photos, I export a .jpg back out to the filesystem. That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted. The Photos app crashes not infrequently.

goalieca 1y ago
Photos uses sqlite. I came across this but haven't tried them yet. https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries
- grgergo 1y ago
  There is also osxphotos for macOS. https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
ValentineC 1y ago
> That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted. It's a folder that acts like a file. Right click > Show Package Contents works, and there's an "originals" folder that should have all your photos in normal everyday files.
- driggs 1y ago
  Instead of being organized by album, they're all thrown together with the filenames as UUIDs instead of the original name, or any useful name whatsoever. The editing steps I've applied to the raw files are, of course, not present. The important parts are all stuffed into a single giant .sqlite file, it looks like there may be other shared resources as well. The point is that - from a data safety standpoint - it would be better if all of the internal metadata were persisted per album, if not per photo. That way one corrupted file would only affect a small subset, rather than causing me to lose the whole library.

hosteur 1y ago

I am not letting Apple Photos touch my photos. Neither Google Photos, etc. All my photos are managed using Digikam and developed using Darktable. They are also visualized via immich, but immich only has access via a read-only mountpoint. Everything is hosted locally of course.

tehlike 1y ago
I am moving this direction, but for now as a redundancy purpose. Copied google take out into immich, who has its mountpoint use truenas iscsi backed by zfs. Zfs is set to take snapshots frequently.
- luke-stanley 1y ago
  Just a warning, I don't think that ZFS snapshots are sufficient for ZFS bitrot protection. Ensuring ZFS has at least 2 copies on physically separate disks and using scrub frequently is the way, right? Please correct me if I am wrong HN!
  - tehlike 1y ago
    Right, zfs snapshots are for the case myself, or any of the software i use (e.g. immich) messes up something.

cmurf 1y ago

The default behavior for handling cards containing images is a read-only mount, and copy all the images without any modifications. When flash fails it returns garbage or zeros instead of (what was) your data. It can be tranient or persistent. And without any error codes from the storage device or the file system. If storage returns garbage for filesystem metadata, all bets are off how the OS filesystem driver will behave. Reformat should be done in camera. And that card used only in that camera. And only that camera gets to write to that card. And don't delete individual images.

tehlike 1y ago

Past few days, i created a copy of all my photos on google in my nas. This gave me a peace of mind in case something catastrophic happens (image corruption, account getting banned etc)...

locao 1y ago

I'm feeling dumb, but that seems a really different RailsConf than I was expecting.

VeejayRampay 1y ago

for context, the author is Aaron Patterson of Ruby and Ruby and Rails fame, a proficient C programmer and overall hacker, he knows his stuff

yard2010 1y ago

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake. I learned the hard way to never delete photos from the SD. Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway. Great article by the way, sounds like my kind of rabbit hole :)

anon1395 1y ago
> Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway Not a good idea, you are going to have piles and piles of SD cards that will be hard to manage, and you will burn through $$$.
- sgammon 1y ago
  people have catalogued and tracked physical items for centuries without issue; a 1TB SD card is now $75 and can store perhaps a year worth of photos
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  I do the same (though not for personal photos, only for my professional wedding work). SD cards are small, I have a stack in a safe. Every professional/paid client I shoot for, I do on new SD cards. I have dual slot cameras, so one card just permanently lives in my camera and gets formatted between shoots, the other I treat as a one-time use card. Doesn't eat into my margin too much, and I appreciate the extra redundancy when dealing with someone else's wedding photos, so that if somehow something went catastrophically wrong with the rest of my back up process and off sites, at the very least I still have the SD card with the RAWs on it.
  - dkga 1y ago
    Gosh I hoped all wedding photographers thought to do the same...
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      You'd be surprised. I've seen and heard some real horror stories. My $dayjob is IT/infrastructure ops, so backup hygiene is engraved in me as a core value. A shocking amount of people outside of tech have no concept of backups or redundancy.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Imagine having the resources of Apple and not testing your software. We deserve better.

pandemic_region 1y ago

> Bought a new laptop Bought a new camera: the OM System OM-1 MKii I think he was just looking for an excuse to buy new kit

aakkaakk 1y ago

This bug has been there for years, probably a decade. I got similar symptoms as mentioned, I suspected AFS+, but what do I know. It has happened on at least 3 iphones (pros), now when I think about it, I don’t remember any iphone I haven’t have troubles with. Having 5000+ images (non-raw) where 5-10% are corrupt is infuriating, but I just stupidly buy another iphone every year (the most expensive one). Re-importing images 10-100 times could sometimes extract a few additional images, but the phone just disconnects after a while when running such scripts.

hn111 1y ago

I remember years ago I lost some random videos on iCloud (synced via the Photos app). The filenames were there but they couldn't be opened anymore and seemed corrupt. Since then I never trusted iCloud anymore and switched to Syncthing (which back then also messed up some of my data if I recall correctly) and then Nextcloud.

spike021 1y ago

I realize it's easy to think or assume this is a bug affecting everyone but for what it's worth, I've had zero issues importing photos from my Sony a6000 and a7iii for the past eight or so years. Tens of thousands of photos at this point. For the longest time my process while traveling was importing onto my iPad or occasionally my iPhone since I didn't have a personal laptop, just a Mac Mini at home.

ImPrajyoth 1y ago

It feels less of security related and and more of ecosystem lock-in related to be honest

renewiltord 1y ago

Use photorec to recover from the old SD card even if you deleted Then for the current files you’ll want to see what happened. Often with this class of problem either the bytes are zeroed or shifted. Since the size is the same, perhaps they’re zeroed or perhaps bytes are LE to BE or dumb shit like that (don’t know why it would be but weird world right). Just diff and see if you see anything (I wrote off memory but you get the idea) diff -aui <(xxd -r file1) <(xxd -r file2) If files are getting zeroed sucks but otherwise maybe you can swizzle it back out. If full bytes look weird, look at binary representation and see if you have pattern. From that bare start you can see what’s up.

reboot81 1y ago

Im interested to see if you encounter the same with a different phone. Most probably a software issue, but are we sure it isnt something defective with your phone?

ericye16 1y ago
My read of the article is that they were importing photos from their camera to their laptop, so there's no phone involved anywhere here.

anArbitraryOne 1y ago

It comes back to my fundamental philosophy that apple is the problem and we should abandon it until it shapes up

BrtByte 1y ago

Kind of horrifying. You expect Photos to be dumb and slow, sure, but corrupting files

BonoboIO 1y ago
Dumb, slow, corrupt That describes 2025 too

xlii 1y ago

I feel it's OM camera issue. I've been importing raws for years from Sony and earlier from Pentax and didn't experience it. In fact searching for "OM image corruption" shows bunch of results not related to Apple Photo. My guess is that OM has buggy SD driver which starts deletion before actual read finished.

luke-stanley 1y ago
I ran into the same corruption issue without any sort of RAW images and without using OM camera. My partner was pissed at me, thinking it was my fault. But it turns out that Apple Photos is to blame!
borisgolovnev 1y ago
But OP says they tried different SD card readers. And, now that Macbooks have SD card readers and every desktop dock and type c dongle thing has one, who even uses the camera to transfer photos?

poolnoodle 1y ago

Apple just isn't as good at software anymore. The same thing can be said for almost any big software company, though. Generally QA seems to really not be a priority anymore.

a96 1y ago
Never has been. But seems they've managed to do some effective PR if people think they were.

elliotec 1y ago

Always count on Tenderlove for a detailed technical deep dive! I've missed your blog. Tangential story - 12-13 years ago I was a burgeoning and super eager software dev that moved to Seattle to be closer to "the scene." tenderlove's content was a major reason for me going there and I poured through his posts learning way too much about Nokogiri, Active Record, and much much more. I went to every Ruby meetup I could get to out there and I remember one in particular, a Seattle RB meetup, in the Substantial office. It was a pretty small group, at most 15-20 people. I was with a coder buddy but knew nobody else. We were all just drinking pints of Manny's beer and eating pizza from Big Mario's or something. Ryan Davis (the creator of minitest among other things) was doing a presentation on Unicode. Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) was cracking jokes at every opportunity. At one point I asked a relatively naive question and Aaron _tenderly_ answered in joke-form response. I felt such a _part_ of the scene then. Aja Hammerly was super engaged in the presentation, I think even Ryan Bates and/or Geoffrey Grosenbach were there. It was quite surreal to be in this dream-like state around giants and heroes just doing what they were doing and being so inclusive. It seemed so normal but became a core memory. Thanks for everything Aaron, you've truly been an inspiration!

amatecha 1y ago

Wow, I wonder if the same issue exists in the "Image Capture" app which I've used for years on my old MacBook to transfer photos off my iPhone. I would transfer everything off and occasionally find that some photos are inexplicably corrupted. The app itself is terrible, it regularly shows it imported an image but didn't, or it arbitrary imports a couple images completely randomly NOT from the ones I selected, so I end up with weird duplicates and stuff. :\

CharlesW 1y ago

"I don’t know if this is a problem that is specific to OM System cameras, and I’m not particularly interested in investing in a new camera system just to find out." A better way to have further narrowed down the problem down to Actually iPhoto would've been to do the same tests with a USB-C card reader plugged directly into the Mac, which would've eliminated cables, hubs, and camera hardware/software/firmware as possibilities. It's worth noting that searches show that OM-1 USB support is imperfect, the camera manual addresses that "USB transfers aren’t guaranteed in some setups", and user consensus seems to be to use a card reader for reliable file transfers.

chiefgeek 1y ago
This. I work as a professional photographer. Nikon shooter. I only ever import directly from my camera in very rare cases. And when I have a problem importing directly from card to Lightroom, first step is to copy everything to the hard drive and import from there.
- softfalcon 1y ago
  Yeah, seconded. For all cameras of all brands, pop the SD card out and into a reliable reader (I recommend Lexar and Sony hubs). Never use the camera over USB, the experience is terrible on everything from Canon to Sony to Panasonic to Fuji. Don't fight it, just buy that $30 USB hub and get on with your day.
  - girvo 1y ago
    Exactly. I'm no longer even a semi-pro photog, but these days I even just plug in a USB-C SD reader into my iPhone and upload them that way, it's quite nice really. No corruption yet for me, but I only shot a thousand photos on my trip to Italy, and few other than that these days!
    - k310 1y ago
      Fortunate. I remember when an SD card reader would NOT work on an iPhone, and yet the same device and iOS on the iPad would work. Obviously on purpose. I’m an old Unix guy. Files are files. Card to computer. Process later.

otterdude 1y ago

Apple is the new dogshit. Having serious issues with nearly every one of their offerings. Apple TV app needs to be logged in every time. iTunes plays video/audio out of sync. hardware failures on macbook pro / apple watch. I've stopped buying apple stuff

trevorkoob 1y ago

I've stopped using photos entirely due to import bugs. So much wasted time, now I just use image capture to import and organize directly. Still get errors from time to time. Apple needs to hire more quality control, their software integration is going from a positive to a negative. Seamless integration was a large part of Apple's initial hook, and continues to be a part of their drive to push services, it should be a priority.

dkga 1y ago

Curiously, to me at least the image of the corrupted file was itself corrupted and not shown by my browser. Or maybe Apple didn't want me to see the corrupted file... :)

nothrowaways 1y ago

Apple photos also distorts photos. It makes all celebrity selfies look they were driving in the UK.

imagetic 1y ago

Photos has always corrupted stuff.

wormius 1y ago

And Absolute Apple Photos app corrupts images absolutely. (sorry not sorry)

dbg31415 1y ago

The headline should really note that this only affects people importing from a digital camera. For the 99.999% of us who just use our phone, nothing to worry about. Scared me for no reason! =P

drnick1 1y ago

You couldn't pay me to go back to using anything made by Apple or Google. I use a GrapheneOS Pixel and my self-hosted "cloud" with Nextcloud, HomeAssitant, and my own email server and the control and performance are unrivaled by any of the Big Tech crapware. I could start self-hosting an AI chatbot I suppose, but these do not seem to have reached the point of enshiffication yet as relatively new services.

abustamam 1y ago
It may be a bit pedantic but Pixel is made by Google. I know you de-Googlefied it by using Graphene but it's still running on Google hardware. I wonder if there are any viable alternatives though.
- drnick1 1y ago
  You could use a Linux phone, but that would almost certainly mean worse hardware and/or worse compatibility with Android programs (emulator). But for all intents and purposes, when running Graphene Google has no power over you and can't enforce arbitrary bans on sideloading, call recording, etc.
- sfRattan 1y ago
  I assume GP comment is referring to their software, especially cloud-deployed software, which can change under your feet like quicksand. Hardware, once assembled and in your hands, is yours to a higher degree than that. Eventually each Pixel phone will stop getting firmware updates, but Google has guaranteed 7 years of updates for the newest models. For the future, Graphene OS devs have stated publicly that they're working with an unnamed hardware vendor to develop a phone that will meet their list of hardware requirements. Currently only the Pixel line does. From what I understand, a few Samsung phones come close, but don't support bootloader re-locking... When you unlock Samsung bootloaders it burns out a fuse on the board which in turn completely disables Knox, their architecture for a trusted execution environment.
  - drnick1 1y ago

maipen 1y ago

In the age of AI, apple should just open source these basic apps. They really don’t have anything to lose if they this.

zahirbmirza 1y ago

I have had raw files on an CF card that were corrupted by an import attempt. I never used iOS import again unless the card was backed up to a computer first. Recently, importing via image capture has resulted in recurrent crashes. Files appear on Image Capture that do not appear on the iPhone, nor can they be downloaded via image capture, or deleted. I wish I knew wtfudge was going on.

stmw 1y ago

"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2011-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...

zenmac 1y ago

Noticed that quite bit on old backups of large libs. Being just using Image Capture and backing up to filesystem!!! HD is probably a better medium time backup than some proprietary photo app.

mulmen 1y ago

I recently bought a house and the seller included some slides from when he bought the house in 1993. They are still clear and visible, even without a projector. I highly doubt I will be able to share my iCloud photos in 2057.

ByteDrifter 1y ago

I’m not a pro, but I use iCloud Photos to back up everything. This bug honestly makes me nervous. If something gets corrupted and I don’t even notice I might lose years of memories without knowing.

Obscurity4340 1y ago
Might want to have some redundancy for that just in case. I would never trust them for something as important as that
a96 1y ago
That really is not a backup. You should store things in files (disk images or archives) and media that you control and can checksum. And which you know you can recover from without relying on any service, company, or download being available in the future. Make sure to replicate before the media rots and have redundant copies. That way, digital data can be kept unchanged indefinitely.

intrasight 1y ago

So restore your original images.

watersb 1y ago

iTunes plays audio files. It also has metadata for the audio: Artist, Title, album art, how many times a song has played... It writes the metadata into the audio file. Badly. In particular, it's that "Play Count": iTunes rewrites the audio file every time you play the song. Usually it just corrupts the metadata enough to forget the album art. But it's perfectly willing to destroy the audio data.

pikuseru 1y ago

“It just works”

mjankowski 1y ago

wait, it wasn't doing that already?

dchftcs 1y ago

People should stop using the Photos app. It is an application designed to lock you in first, make your life hard second, and manage your photos a far third. If photos are important to you, you should never ever put the master copies in an opaquely-managed proprietary container. It prevents you from auditing your files easily, it also prevents you from making backups in other media. Photos isn't even useful; leaving the photos as files allows you to pick multiple tools to manage them better.

tonixx 1y ago

[dead]