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Apple Photos app corrupts images

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Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#401

Post by jmb99 »

crote wrote: post #309
JKCalhoun wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the Photos team a decade ago — some of what you're saying I can vouch for. If it is a rare occurrence, that lowers the priority of the bug. Data corruption though? That moves it to the top. I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release. "We've…

> if you saw the number of bugs that queue up for a popular app like Photos, you'd know that fixing all of them is not going to be possible Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers? Your app doesn't have an unlimited number of bugs: if you are solving them faster than you are introducing them, the number of bugs will eventually approach zero. Sure, y…

> Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers?

Unfortunately, in the real world, # of bugs solved per unit time does not scale linearly with # of developers - and, you eventually reach enough people that you can't effectively coordinate changes without wasting more time on processes than you're gaining by adding another person.

I've never worked at Apple and I don't know anyone on the Photos team, but I imagine a company at that scale probably has a good idea as to the optimal number of developers working on one application. Optimal to Apple probably involves optimal money spent:money earned ratio, not most bugs fixed per unit time, but I would wager those numbers are pretty similar anyways.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#403

Post by price »

com2kid wrote: post #270
kridsdale1 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was at Microsoft when it happened and it felt like a fear response to the newer agile tech companies like Facebook that wrote blog posts about releasing daily. Many teams at Microsoft had a weeks to months long QA process before software went out the door, and many developers had been arguing for years that "QA is the blocker". The complicated thing is, they were kind of right, and kind of wrong. QA in some orgs we…

Thanks for sharing that story! I love that your dream was to be the last line of defense protecting users from bad software. We need more of that, and it's sad that execs at Microsoft and others have made it harder.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#404

Post by crossroadsguy »

drnick1 wrote: post #342

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.

And one shouldn't. Even if you use their devices and OS (and many people "have to!"), one should stay away from their app and services offerings.

Use third party apps/services which usually function on interoperable standards/specs.

It's been years since I have used any service by either of these companies where my personal data stays inside their ecosystem - email, notes, pics, videos et cetera.. nothing.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#405

Post by m463 »

drnick1 wrote: post #342

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 could start self-hosting an AI chatbot

I was surprised nextcloud has a whole bunch of ai plugins

https://apps.nextcloud.com/categories/ai

funny, I run nextcloud but don't add all these plugins because they require* you to install from the cloud.

* there's a way to install apps locally, but you had to install the app store and it quickly became very complicated.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#406

Post by mort96 »

soperj wrote: post #378
mort96 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unfortunate, but your passwords should be such that it would take an attacker millions of years to guess the password through HTTP requests.

That's a little bit Victim Blamey.

Security unfortunately relies on users doing things at least somewhat right.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#407

Post by bigiain »

KerrAvon wrote: post #282
SoftTalker wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.

Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies. Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959

Of course, the seconds that matter might be someone else's medical emergency, which your iPhone or Apple Watch is slowing down with false positives.

From https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/03/iphone-crash-detection-critic...

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#408

Post by jbverschoor »

alsetmusic wrote: post #167
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #46

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…

They asked me for a sysdiagnose when I complained about how crappy their new Finder disk icon looks on macOS 26. See this rant by Jeff Johnson, who called for a boycott on filing bugs with Apple a couple years back (I stuck to the boycott except for two obvious UI design issues in the latest OS because neither required repro steps (so why the sysdiagnose?)). https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html Edit: acc…

Oh I stored filing bugs years ago. It frustrating as hell and pointless

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#409

Post by mrheosuper »

sfRattan wrote: post #354
cons0le wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be out of the loop, but can't google just kill GrapheneOS anytime it wants? I never tried it out because I assumed that in the near future it won't be compatible with banking and messaging apps. Do they have a long term plan to exist in 5-10 years?

My banking app didn't work for a while on Graphene OS, but now it does again. In the interim I was able to use the bank's mobile website in a pinch. Password manager apps (I've tried Bitwarden and KeePassDX) integrate with the hardened Vanadium browser and made signing in a breeze. I lost immediate transaction notifications, but it was at least tolerable. I suspect banks won't ever be able to take their web portals d…

>I suspect banks won't ever be able to take their web portals down and go app-only

Nowaday all my interaction with online bank is through their app.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#410

Post by yummypaint »

crote wrote: post #309
JKCalhoun wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the Photos team a decade ago — some of what you're saying I can vouch for. If it is a rare occurrence, that lowers the priority of the bug. Data corruption though? That moves it to the top. I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release. "We've…

> if you saw the number of bugs that queue up for a popular app like Photos, you'd know that fixing all of them is not going to be possible Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers? Your app doesn't have an unlimited number of bugs: if you are solving them faster than you are introducing them, the number of bugs will eventually approach zero. Sure, y…

Garbage software still makes lots of money. Sometimes more than good software, and certainly more than the best software. Just look at the windows vs Linux ecosystem for a simple task like screen recording with decent compression. Open source tools are superior, but can be harder to even find on windows due to the poorer signal/noise ratio from all the terrible for profit/enshittification software. Some graphics drivers have dashboards that do screen recording, but that is not a universal solution.

The most viable free options on windows seem to be sketchy cloud stuff designed to be inconvenient enough to upsell you. On Linux it's either built in already or trivial to install something that records locally and doesn't rug pull the user demanding money.

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