Apple Photos app corrupts images • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#241

Post by thewebguyd » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

kramer2718 wrote: post #160

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.

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#242

Post by Bud » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #113

pants2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.

A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.

[dead]

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#243

Post by BrtByte » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

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

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#244

Post by BrtByte » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

What’s wild is that this kind of bug feels like something that should’ve been caught with even minimal end-to-end integrity checks

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#245

Post by kridsdale1 » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #235

myshkin5 wrote: post #117

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.

I would love to know if they even invest enough into QA resources. For a company like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon etc... I guess anything that qualifies as FAANG, I would prefer their QA departments be slightly overstaffed and that they do redundant testing than messing up with completely avoidable software issues. Sometimes the production bugs are embarrassingly obvious so much so it screams no QA team was…

I used to be in QA at Apple before I became a SWE.

Used to be, these were full software engineers embedded with dev teams, with a mission to destroy, document, and harden the apps and frameworks.

During the 2010s in all the FAANG that I’m aware of (have worked at 3), QA as a high paid American profession was completely offshored to India and responsibility for quality removed from developers concern. It’s a blocking item on the Launch Checklist. Automated testing was expected to fill the gap but has mostly been ignored.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#246

Post by BrtByte » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

asolove wrote: post #43

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.

Never thought to suspect Photos itself

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#247

Post by zdragnar » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #238

ben_w wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clipboard is no longer reliable. Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?

Clipboard has been unstable on every OS (especially on Desktop - and I mean Linux, Windows and Mac), and I think part of the culprit is apps like Teams and Discord, if you Ctrl + C by mistake on an empty text box, IT COPIES THE EMPTY TEXT BOX effectively wiping your clipboard. It's the most irritating UX and it took me years to figure out. Always right click copy and right click paste, you'll notice it works 100% of…

Copying empty text is a configurable flag in some linux environments, at least, but I'm not sure if that behavior is faithfully preserved in teams / discord / etc as I've never really had it on.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#248

Post by jmpz » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

xmddmx wrote: post #220

myshkin5 wrote: post #117

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.

I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen: * iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices! * Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list * Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later. * Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own dri…

The thing is, in many cases, these products and teams are very siloed from each other. I suspect, having worked in one of these teams, that some of the issues comes from this siloing. Lessons learned aren't shared, and it can be difficult to build integrations.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#249

Post by xlii » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#250

Post by poolnoodle » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

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.