Apple Photos app corrupts images • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#151

Post by in_cahoots » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

doodaddy wrote: post #84

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…

Yeah, after you've had this problem once it seems you'd uncheck delete after import before buying a literally entirely new photography system.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#152

Post by roc856a » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#153

Post by cwmoore » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

eptcyka wrote: post #142

montebicyclelo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You should’ve put an airtag on them first.

Yes, two or three to make sure.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#154

Post by shermantanktop » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #112

imchillyb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs and lower quality production? That’s what technical debt is. It’s the cost for moving forward quickly. I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to state.

> How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs You seem to be assuming that the company will eventually pay off the technical debt rather than just continue accumulating it and lowering production quality.

? This is the system working as designed. The whole game, from startup to fortune 500, is to accumulate market power fast enough to avoid tech debt swallowing you whole.

Once you have market power (which means different things for different companies) you can safely feed the tech debt monster just as little as you feel like.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#155

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #74

deviation wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 si…

I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#156

Post by eviks » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

inanutshellus wrote: post #71

deviation wrote: post #12

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.

Interesting that he went from 30% failure to it taking a while to find a single failure after replacing everything. Random is random, and random is clumpy, so maybe swapping parts is irrelevant, but... I wanted more detail how often the corruption happened throughout his replacement journey. edit: also wth i just realized I went to "tenderlovemaking.com" at work. gross. lol.

That's not everything that happened, a big non-replacement part

> I stopped checking the “delete after import” button

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#157

Post by driggs » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#158

Post by hosteur » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#159

Post by cmurf » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#160

Post by kramer2718 » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

roc856a wrote: post #152

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.

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.