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Apple Photos app corrupts images

tenderlovemaking.com

361–370 of 471 posts

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#361

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.

How do you deal with deliverability issues on the self hosted email server. I've always heard that's a hard or at least finicky problem.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#362
post #57

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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#363

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.

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.

iTunes Match has routinely just... removed/greyed out files that I've had uploaded, and I've reported this to Apple over and over again, with exactly zero explanation of why or how to avoid it. To this day it still does it.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Personally, I am not too interested in the "security" features of Graphene. There is at least a subset of Graphene users who only care about "security" and go as far as recommending the use of sandboxed Play Services over F-Droid because of it. They despise rooting, sideloading and other mods that give user control.

Yeah, that's fair enough. Security and privacy aren't totally mutually excluse, but there are absolutely tradeoffs. And security in a modern threat environment and customizability (at root level) are pretty much non-overlapping circles on a venn diagram.

My perspective is that I want one or two devices in my life, ideally one phone and then either a tablet or small laptop, which are maximally secure and almost never leave my direct custody. I am willing to give up root on these devices to achieve that level of security. Though I'll note that sideloading apps is absolutely possible on Graphene OS.

There are plenty of other general purpose computers at home on which I have root access and can use to tinker and experiment to my heart's content, and which I do not use for highly sensitive personal information (banking, primary email, etc).

The other important difference for me is that, whereas Graphene OS restricts root access for end-user security, companies making locked down devices withhold root from the end-user in order to keep control for themselves.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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!

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#366

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.

Or just treat the SD cards as write-once and keep buying new ones

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#367

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.

I'm 100% with you on this, but this only works if you've got a) The time and b) The knowledge to do it. I don't have a lot of time for my homelab stuff anymore. I mean thankfully things like Immich are just a "docker compose pull && docker compose up -d" away, which is fantastic, but even the knowledge to get to being able to issue a "docker pull" command isn't for everyone.

Also when you die that stuff'll go offline pretty quick I expect...

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I've only submitted two security reports, both for very blatant bugs, and they've booth been closed as "works as intended".

I don't think my bank had intended to make passwords optional, and the third-party administrator of their bug bounty program agreed, when creating the report, but once it made it to the bank, it was up to them to decide if it was or was not a bug.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#369
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

how is this different from any product with a billion users and 100,000+ live bug reports? I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!): 1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error. 2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche) 3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround…

I'm amazed at what Google was okay with. For a while there, if you had access to Chrome's files, for a user logged in with Chrome that had a credit card on file with Google, you could initiate a Google Pay payment with no further authorization.

They also used to let anyone add any gmail address to a Google Groups group, and send out unfilterable spam as a message from that group.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse about the Apple ecosystem is that because of how tightly coupled it is, a bug fix for Photos would only come as part of a macOS update. Which means that if that bug has been present since the (now unsupported) Mavericks, tough luck!

I still don't under stand why Apple limits updates to their first party apps to OS updates. They could really benefit from how Google does it on Android and decouple it. Push updates to their first party apps via the app store like everyone else, and let the OS update on its own separate schedule.

Google used to keep it coupled on Chrome OS, and older Chromebooks can only run insecure versions of Chrome.
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