Live data from Hacker News

Apple Photos app corrupts images

tenderlovemaking.com

71–80 of 471 posts

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#71

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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#73
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.

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#74

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.

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 sides" it's "oh but not that one!")

(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)

Re: Apple Photos app corrupts images

#79

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.

I wonder if it’s related to import sources, and maybe the speed of that hardware. They are still successfully importing the photos into the Photos app, just not from the camera.
Post reply on HN