Apple Photos app corrupts images (tenderlovemaking.com)

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

(I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)

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 :(

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> 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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec

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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.

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.

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.

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.