Apple Photos app corrupts images | Hacker News Reader

Apple Photos app corrupts images

tenderlovemaking.com

1,214 pointspattyj439 comments

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.

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 read it.

I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them.

It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company.

I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.

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.)

Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.

This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.

now this is agile QA

Worked for the company I was at.

There were certain photographers and publications, that, if they got upset, all hands were on deck, for even the most innocuous bugs.

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.

five year olds shouldn't have a phone, and should be supervised. even if they have a phone, they are unlikely to handle it with the care it requires.

Thread is talking about kids knowing how to request emergency services with a nearby phone in case something happens to their parent(s). Nothing to do with giving kids their own phones.

A nearby phone implies a nearby phone user that would presumably understand how to place an emergency call, especially if they are being asked by a frantic five year old.

if it’s only the kid and the nearby phone user, and the nearby phone user is having an emergency (that’s also preventing them from being able to call themselves) then the kid is able to do it.

Maybe when something is done to prevent school shootings this can be a discussion

A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.

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.

Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life.

Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it.

Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.

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

To be fair this kind of thing is emotionally manipulative.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a lot as a private organization to raise standards for automotive safety but the statistics they publish that show that larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles are frequently wrongly interpreted -- in many of the cases where the large vehicle does better it's not that you die in the smaller vehicle but instead get a broken bone. Once something is seen as "life or death" some people will think they have no choice but to spend another $50,000, spew another 20 tons of carbon pollution, etc.

> larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles

Just pointing this out. It’s easy to see what you actually meant :)

Depending on your luck a broken bone can permanently lower your quality of life

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.

Yep, this is the other side of the coin for sure. There should probably be some basic training around these features; there will still be many (careless) people that just completely ignore the "are you OK?" question the watch/phone is asking them but maybe the situation would improve.

> 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

I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?

well you're already starting off assuming that the kid is holding an iPhone. so its already an "oh but not that one" situation.

Here's the official Apple Information on how to do this:

In case of emergency, use your iPhone to quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts (provided that cellular service is available). After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel. Your iPhone sends your current location (if available) and—for a period of time after you enter SOS mode—your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes.

Note: If you have iPhone 14 or later (any model), you may be able to contact emergency services through satellite if cell service isn’t available. See Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone.

Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release the buttons.

Or you can enable iPhone to start Emergency SOS when you quickly press the side button five times. Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, then turn on Call with 5 Presses.

If you ever get the chance, maybe you can be the one that improves that process some day.

Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.

Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.

Did you take a job at Apple just so you can accept one or more of those PR's that's been bugging you? :)

Wasn't there an xkcd about that scenario...

Just gotta be careful...

https://xkcd.com/1739/

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.

Industry baseline is slightly worse again e.g. attempt to report a bug in a Microsoft product that a major government customer is experiencing when they use it with our stuff, but Microsoft won't accept the bug report because we don't ourselves have an enterprise support contract with them, and the customer's own relationship with MS is nigh-impossible to navigate because of public sector nonsense.

> I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars

This was financed by equally massive technical debt.

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.

Example of debt caught up with company is latest Meta AR glasses presentation

> I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple.

From your description, your experience is quite typical.

mmm, it was better than the "closed as duplicate" (of an internal bug that you can't access) path that used to be the big complaint about radar...

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 (incl partial workarounds).

4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years.

---

Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed.

After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later.

---

Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues.

---

NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.

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.

They still do, I use add-anyone all the time. The trick is that they implemented serious anti-spam on groups, which them allows them to keep this feature. It's of course not perfect but good enough.

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: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.

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

"Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports"

Hm. That is more than I ever got, but I also never bothered to report anything to any company after being ignored the first tries.

Unless you get paid by Apple, why would you spend any amount of time doing work for them?

Because you want them to fix a bug they might not be aware of, and bug reports are also votes of importance

Open radar is a just a landfill. Nothing ever gets picked up for fixing

Same here. They have a known bugs where entries will vanish from your contacts. Data loss is a big deal (or so I thought).

Support asked me to let them know when a contact vanishing did so they could gather logs from me phone.

Once I was finally able to see it happen, I reached out. Reported that it had just happened overnight. The customer support said it was too long of a time frame for engineers to investigate because "it generates a lot of logs and that's too much to go through". I could not believe their answer.

I just moved my contacts to Gmail and that was the end of it.

Have you tried copying the files to the local disk before importing?

This is what I always do. Rather than go directly from the card reader or camera into Photos or Lightroom, I copy the files onto an SSD, and then bring them in from the SSD. The entire process goes faster.

I also want to point out that I've seen similar corruption in the past, only in Lightroom. The culprit ended up being hardware, not software. Specifically, the card reader's USB cable. I've actually had two of these cables fail on different readers. On the most recent one, I replaced it with a nicer Micro B to USB C cable, and haven't had an issue.

I haven't had actual corruption but had imports take an excessive long time or fail to complete in Lightroom because of bad USB cables or (I think) bad USB jack.

Generally I'm frustrated with the state of USB. Bad cables are all over the place and I'm inclined to throw cables out if I have the slightest problem with them. My take is that the import process with Lightroom is fast and reliable if I am using good readers and good cables; it is fine importing photos from my Sony a7iv off a CFExpress card but my Sony a7ii has always been problematic and benefits greatly from taking the memory card out and putting it in a dedicated reader, sometimes I use the second slot in the a7iv.

I use Lightroom, but always with this workflow (copy files from memory card to disk, then use LR to do the import / move / build previews).

If nothing else, it lets you get your card back much more quickly, as a file-system copy runs at ~1500MBps, which makes a difference when importing 50-100GB of photos.

I also don't delete the images off the memory card until they've been backed up from the disk to some additional medium.

I haven't tried super fast memory cards, but with why I have, importing by copying from the card maxes out the card (~100 MB/s). Bonus points for the preview generation starting while the copy is ongoing.

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!

MacOS updates are several per year though. If a fixes found (and the bug considered a high enough priority) it could show up before 2025 is up.

It’s a way to force you to update those apps. They don’t want you on the latest OS and on an old Music or Photos.

Sure, but I want to be on an older macOS and be given the option to use the latest Music or Photos.

For example, I'm probably not going to be upgrading to Tahoe until Sequoia's close to end of support life. I just upgraded to Sequoia last month from Ventura (decided to skip Sonoma since the various anecdotes of Sequoia made it sound like Sonoma-with-AI, with few apps breaking because of some new API change).

It’s more a problem for Macs not supported with OS updates like the 2019 13” models right now.

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.

They somehow separate out certain apps, like Safari (on occasion), the iWork suite, and the Pro apps, but I have no idea why they insist on coupling apps like Photos and Music to OS updates.

Safari is interesting. It's been separate, except for major macOS updates, which had it bundled. But if you had a newer Safari on an older macOS, and upgraded macOS to anything else that the latest version, then your Safari was downgraded, often causing data loss..

In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.

Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..

A lot of them are also the library surface for a lot of internal foundational libraries. Photos is also PhotoKit, similarly with email. It's essentially over coupled.

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

> I'd report it to Apple

What's the point of it? It is well known in the industry they ignore bugreports.

Also, this bug doesn't affect the majority of users, so it won't ever be fixed.

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 already lived with that old bug…" seems to be the mind set. Oh well.

To be sure though, 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 — some kind of system of prioritization is required.

> 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.

This mentality is all over BigTech: This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X? So, it inevitably just sits in the backlog forever. If your releases are 90 days apart, any bug found has an average of 45 days to be fixed, or it ends up on the "we lived with it last time" list.

If you have more bugs than you can fix in a given amount of time then you have to prioritize somehow.

“This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X?” Is actually a pretty strong argument and tough, but not impossible, to counter.

And the bug backlog only gets longer with time. It’s the price of greatly increased software complexity.

Yeah, I have had friends in Apple and they have described pretty much the same approach. It's perfectly understood.

There is one more thing that gets factored into the bug triage. If the bug affects professional users (as in, data corruption from external media) - fuck them. Apple couldn't care less about professional users. The priority is to fix Photos.app for utility gauge pics and preferably in HEIC and other default settings.

> 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, you'll always have newly-introduced bugs which are still waiting to get fixed, but if you've got an ever-increasing pile of bugs which have been around for years - even when they have been reported with easy-to-reproduce steps - then something has gone horribly wrong with your development process. At a certain point you have to stop shoveling new crap, rethink the workflow which is introducing so many new bugs, and slowly start fixing old bugs. The alternative is that your code will inevitably degrade into 100% bugs and become completely unusable and unmaintainable.

> 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.

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.

> If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well.

This is unfortunately still true. I've had some radars de-prioritized with this exact reason and there are few things more infuriating.

It's really a sign of an overwhelmed, dysfunctional organization, but I heard from an ex-CoreOS guy that that's an intentional management choice, "people perform better under pressure"... (although I'm guessing Photos is not in the CoreOS org)

I think your best bet is to do what you did: write an extensive blog post about it and hope it goes "viral" and grabs the right people at Apple's attention.

I would think the diffs would be telling to the right people.

It's on the front page of HN, so that's a good start!

Front page of HN is all it takes. Pretty sure it's viral.

You don't need repro steps if Apple is serious about quality. Just the description of what's happening should give enough to a senior Apple engineer to intuit where this is possibly happening and create tests that will stress their software to repro this.

I see you've never used Feedback Assistant

You're right. I too have been frustrated when spending the effort to file a bug only to have it "auto-returned" with "cannot repro, please attach example project" or somesuch.

As an engineer on a framework, I take pride in the code and want those trickier-to-repro bugs. And to your point, yeah, I can probably reconstruct in my mind a scenario, knowing my code, where it may be vulnerable.

Whoever screens bugs though is likely trying to 1) handle the huge backlog and 2) trying to spare the engineers bugs delivered with a shrug.

(I had my ass kicked by one bug in particular where I created a FileDescriptor on the main thread, did some things and then released the FileDescriptor on a background thread. Who knew the FileDescriptor code hung some important data it needed on some kind of thread-based storage that essentially required the caller to destroy the FileDescriptor on the same thread it was created on. Fix was to dispatch back to main when ready to release the FileDescriptor.)

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.

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.

I'd be interested in knowing if he was multitasking and using a lot of memory. I know wedding photos are usually something you feel rushed to upload so maybe this issue can be made worse depending on system resource availability.

yeah copying can take a loooooooong time and so you multitask.

maybe the randomness is based on the other apps he's using at the same time.

Since it looks like a concurrency issue, most likely the new laptop made the issue less frequent through the simple virtue of being faster.

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

> I stopped checking the “delete after import” button

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.

Sounds like an argument for Apple to provide a new high-level media import framework?

Why? A new framework gets you new bugs instead of the old ones, but not necessarily fewer or less severe ones.

It’s more likely that things will be reversed: the old, battle-tested framework may have bugs, but it’s is less likely to have serious ones.

They should try to hunt down bugs in the existing code. A partial rewrite of parts that historically have many bugs may be in order, but a complete replacement? Unlikely to be an improvement.

Well I'd imagine the new framework wouldn't rewrite old but wrap the existing low level APIs in a way that is not error prone. Centralize the tricky bits so Photos and third party apps don’t each have to reinvent them?

Maybe bad RAM flipping bits?

Edit: Nevermind, the contents are vastly changed. This is like a different stream of input got used, or a buffer was written over with contents from another image.

This bug has happened on multiple, perhaps all, iphones I ever owned, I clearly remember at least 3 where I spent hours on trying to save (extract) photos from my iphone with different tools.

”Glad” to see it was an actual bug.

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

Tests can be flaky, and then ignored

I have a few corrupted photos in iCloud that were taken with my iPhone. Maybe there's something larger going on here.

"I don’t know if this is a problem that is specific to OM System cameras, and I’m not particularly interested in investing in a new camera system just to find out."

A better way to have further narrowed down the problem down to Actually iPhoto would've been to do the same tests with a USB-C card reader plugged directly into the Mac, which would've eliminated cables, hubs, and camera hardware/software/firmware as possibilities.

It's worth noting that searches show that OM-1 USB support is imperfect, the camera manual addresses that "USB transfers aren’t guaranteed in some setups", and user consensus seems to be to use a card reader for reliable file transfers.

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!

Fortunate. I remember when an SD card reader would NOT work on an iPhone, and yet the same device and iOS on the iPad would work. Obviously on purpose.

I’m an old Unix guy. Files are files. Card to computer. Process later.

This may be a varying mileage kind of situation. I have an OM1 and basically only ever transferred pictures with the camera's connection. I don't have the fastest SD cards, and the transfer speed I get is the same as my dedicated Sandisk SD card reader, around 100 MB/s.

My older camera only had a usb 2 connection over a special connector, so I used to pop out the card. But the OM1 can also charge the battery via the usb-c connection, so it's an all-round great experience: I don't have to fiddle with random parts, not forget to put them back in, etc.

Never had a single image corrupted among dozens of thousands of them. Funnily enough, my older camera used to complain about the SD card every other time after plugging it into my mac. It would shut up after a format. That card is still going strong.

I transfer the files with lightroom (but don't remove them from the card) on a windows pc.

> the camera manual addresses that "USB transfers aren’t guaranteed in some setups"

That is a... pretty damning thing to have in your user manual. I've owned many cameras over the years, and I don't think I've ever seen a manufacturer hedge basic functionality like this.

They're actually the usual hedges you'll see. Hell, even some mice will say to not plug them into a USB hub.

> Data transfer is not guaranteed in the following environments, even if your computer is equipped with a USB port.

>> Computers with a USB port added by means of an extension card, etc., computers without a factory-installed OS, or home-built computers

Manual for version 1.7 page 286

https://download.omsystem.com/pages/inst/om1/manual_om1_v1.7...

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 import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.

I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.

My first thought was “software troubleshooting is a lot cheaper than hardware troubleshooting!” Maybe the author isn’t bound by the same economic realities as some of us are accustomed to.

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

My workflow is don't delete after import but format the card in the camera afterwards. I have XXXL cards and it is not such a problem if I forget to format.

I had one case where I screwed up a shoot and thought file corruption might have been involved (it wasn't) Even though I had formatted the card with the camera and shot maybe 5 test shots I was able to recover most of the images with Disk Drill

https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html

which has both Windows and Mac versions and looking at a sample of them confirmed it wasn't corruption, it was user error.

(for media files, the linux tool of choice is PhotoRec, sometimes packaged as part of testdisk)

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

Agreed. Proper troubleshooting technique takes into account not just just swapping out parts, but looking at likelihood and cost. Changing software is highly likely to solve the issue as well as being free and fast to check.

This is why Apple makes so much fucking money. Because Photos (non-compatibility with anything else) is the moat.

As a photographer, I agree. Make multiple copies of the files onto the main editing computer, followed by then also backing up direct from SD to the NAS. Never format or delete your cards (the originals) before you are dead sure you have several backups visibly uncorrupted.

I may be paranoid because I used to handle footage for VFX pipelines and you just do not mess around with those kinds of files. If you lose footage, you are in big trouble.

Or stop using the camera to connect to the Mac and just take out the SD card and use a reader like most other photographers do.

I feel like this is a URL that I don't want in my history

Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.

Something something Railed.

Nah that's just a one off

Why? It's brilliant.

The URL might be mistaken for some different content?

Well, then don't browse from the church computer

What's brilliant about it? What's the reference, for those of us unfamiliar?

It is simply hilarious to make grown adults visit a website called tender love making dot com (a sexual reference) to read a very specific and niche blog about technology.

"tender love making" and then the specific URL mention photos and corruption... it could look really bad!

You are welcome not to visit it if you do not want to hear from a Rails contributor for over 10 years.

Of course. I have no issues with that but I acknowledge that it could be funny.

The author's name is tenderlove. He has been a famous contributor to Ruby and Rails for at least 10 years. If this is objectionable to you, it shows your lack of expertise.

Just a nit — your post would have been fine without that last sentence, no need to be prickly. I haven’t touched RoR in 15 years and was not familiar with the name.

ZScaler gets pissed off going to frame.work just because of a “malicious TLD”.

I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.

Sounds like a problem between you and ZScaler (and possibly whoever forces you to use that crap) but not something that anyone else should care about.

In the late 90s my then-wife was watching over my shoulder one day and saw the domain “freshmeat.net” pop up as a possible auto-completion in my address bar. She was justifiably suspicious until I showed her it was just a software distribution site.

Infohazard warning:

C++ reference is one of these.

See also: Experts Exchange, Pen Island

There was also a website for a mole station, but I'm not sure if that one was satire.

Isn't pen island intentional though?

And she wasn’t suspicious of amazon.com? ;)

As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?

Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!

There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time.

https://gearspace.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...

Ha ha, I remember that name.

Modwiggler changed name around the same time.

From what to what?

Original name: muffwiggler

I guess the reason why modern times feel so bland is because we all agree on the lowest common denominator, and then celebrate that as "iNcLuSiViTy". If anything you do has any personality, aka deviates from the standard workflow, it immediately gets a disadvantaged position on the free market.

It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.

Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...

> Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

There are many personalities. Not everything has to be mature

I feel like there's confusion regarding the word "mature". It's supposed to mean that someone has lots of experience and draws knowledge from it, but in reality often people use the word "mature" to describe a certain specific societal ideal of a person that we're supposed to grow into.

The problem is that societal consesus is often wrong, and that image of a perfectly mature person actually does have a lot of problems with it. Every generation discovers this, and redefines that ideal.

40 years ago in my country a "mature man" was expected to take part in alcohol drinking contests until blackout. Nowadays a "mature man" is expected to drink as little alcohol as possible.

Neither attitude is actually about learning and forming a personal, informed opinion, both of them are about following whatever is currently in fashion.

> There are many personalities. Not everything has to be mature

Is a "mature personality" mature ? How do you test for it ? /s

something something "things I don't find funny are objectively bad and wrong and you're a bad person, be a boring serious miserable adult like everyone else" something something

> Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

Yes, they do.

before stackoverflow there was expertsexchange.com and they were forced to add a hyphen to the name because people kept making fun of the expertSEXchange, it became experts-exchange.com

Wow, I probably haven't logged into EE into 20 years. I just tried now and somehow guessed my username and 5 letter password first time. They want $9.99 to let me in, though, but they claim to have all my achievements still...

Oh wow, I'm surprised the name change appears to be so universally appreciated on reddit.

It doesn't strike me as different from "porn" i.e. "unix porn" "food porn" etc, which are at least somewhat widely accepted. I assumed it was self-aware/deprecating humor, as in the people there recognized they were frequently replacing which gear they used beyond what might be strictly necessary.

It was colorful, in the way a lot of music and art is colorful. It's not like it's a sysadmin forum...

If only people who liked a certain GNU image editing app were so appreciative of such an idea...

At one time there was a fork called Glimpse which basically had some minor UI improvements and a sane name.

Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?

This reminds me of a flash games website from 2007. The domain was something like sogay.com. one time I had to spell it to my father. He asked if I'm sure before pressing enter lol

I’m old enough to remember arXiv being hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory under the domain xxx.lanl.gov.

It’s understandable why they changed their name.

This person is a nice person, who's published a huge amount of positive work into the Ruby community. I do wish however they'd change their name from the perspective of a figurehead in the community, we have code referencing their repos and it's just awkward with interns to explain.

Why would a person need to conform to some uniform grey norm to be able to contribute in any capacity?

Ruby's community has been all sorts of whimsy and quirky over the years.

I very much enjoy Tenderlove being the community figurehead he is as is: kind, empathetic, genuine, open-minded, and generally wholesome.

> it's just awkward with interns to explain.

I've never had any trouble talking about Aaron Patterson a.k.a Tenderlove to coworkers, interns or otherwise.

There is also PenIsland.net. I think there was also a .com that featured a big shop but they seem to have moved.

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.

It may be a bit pedantic but Pixel is made by Google. I know you de-Googlefied it by using Graphene but it's still running on Google hardware.

I wonder if there are any viable alternatives though.

You could use a Linux phone, but that would almost certainly mean worse hardware and/or worse compatibility with Android programs (emulator). But for all intents and purposes, when running Graphene Google has no power over you and can't enforce arbitrary bans on sideloading, call recording, etc.

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 working with an unnamed hardware vendor to develop a phone that will meet their list of hardware requirements. Currently only the Pixel line does. From what I understand, a few Samsung phones come close, but don't support bootloader re-locking... When you unlock Samsung bootloaders it burns out a fuse on the board which in turn completely disables Knox, their architecture for a trusted execution environment.

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.

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?

They are working with an OEM to make aGrapheneOS phone with all the security features they require like the ARM Memory Tagging Extensions.

Google could conceivably stop contributing to the AOSP and make future changes private, but the FOSS licence won't prevent others like Graphene and Chinese OEMs from continuing development on their own. I believe Graphene made the deliberate decision to only support Pixel devices because these used to be "reference devices" and have unlocked bootloaders, but I saw somewhere that they are in talks with an OEM to make their own devices.

> I believe Graphene made the deliberate decision to only support Pixel devices because these used to be "reference devices" and have unlocked bootloaders,

From my understanding the biggest reason is actually security features that only the Pixels can meet. I'm sure the reference device thing is a factor though so I don't think you're wrong

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 down and go app-only, though Google is now trying to ram through technologies in the Chrome browser to "verify the computing platform" that will have a similar effect to the Google Play "integrity" checks for apps.

Enduring solutions to these vendor lock-in efforts must ultimately be legislative.

The walls of the Google garden have been slowly going up.

>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.

Ages ago when I had a Windows Phone and still received a physical paycheck, I was unable to deposit the check using my phone because the bank's website didn't (still doesn't in 2025) support depositing a check that way. It only supports depositing checks via their official app on iOS and Android.

And how much time left do you have for your job and loved ones?

Flashing GrapheneOS on a new phone took 10min tops. Setting up Nextcloud using their Docker image does not take much longer than that. Setting up my email server took the most effort, but I did this in hard mode using bare Postfix and Dovecot on Linux. A dockerized email server could be up in a matter of minutes. There is no maintenance beyond sudo apt upgrade.

I think the question between the lines was "how much time did you take to the point where you know how all that stuff works?", or at least that's what I'd include in the spirit of the concern (as someone who knows all this too, and knows that the answer is 100's of hours)

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.

I think the deliverability issues boil down to i) IP, ii) domain age, iii) DKIM setup. The only one that is difficult to get around is i) I suppose; I am fortunate enough to have access to a clean IPv4 in a non-residential block. If you are facing deliverability issues, consider a relay service such as mailgun.

That being said, I mostly receive email, and the privacy benefits of running my own server would still be significant even without the ability to send email at all.

Thanks for that answer.

Re: the privacy benefits, is it just that Google (or whoever) has no access to your mail, or is there another benefit? I'm not doubting, just trying to understand specifically what you protect against? And how much is the benefit diminished, if at all, if most of your correspondents are on a BigMailServer?

Tbh no one really corresponds over email anymore. And most email is sent via Amazon and other email services. So I guess Google can’t read your receipts and bills anymore.

But the main benefit of moving your email off Google is they can’t nuke your email account when the AI decides you are a bot or whatever.

Google not having access to your email is a huge privacy benefit. Even with email becoming less important, most online services still rely on email for sign up and things such as password recovery. You probably also still receive email receipts for flights and online purchases. These are all data points that I would rather Google/Apple/Microsoft not have.

Besides privacy, running your own server means you can create as many mailboxes/aliases as you like. I give each website/company a distinct alias; this allows me to revoke an alias that becomes problematic, e.g. due to spam. There are no storage limits other than those dictated by your hardware, no maximum attachment size, etc. I am immune to "terms and conditions" changing overnight that suddenly shrink my storage or put features such as IMAP access behind a paywall.

For those needing a clean IPv4 for mail servers with reverse DNS support, check out https://hoppy.network - I haven't had any deliverability issues, but my domain has been running for over 5 years now. Here's my self hosting blog series - https://www.naut.ca/blog/2020/05/05/self-hosting-series-part...

- Cofounder of Hoppy

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...

What do you use for a phone provider? I have a Pixel and want to run GrapheneOS, but I'm on Google Fi and believe I'll lose some functionality if I do so. Wondering what plan you use and how it's working for you

I use T-Mobile and phone calls, messages (SMS) and 5G data just work. Without Play Services, you will lose RCS probably. I haven't tested as I don't care about vendor-locked protocols. My suggestion would be to use Signal instead.

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.

> 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.

Why is this relevant for this particular article?

You may want to take a look at Ente for photos, too :) https://ente.io/

I am a happy self-hosting user.

What's the use case for this? I run a Nextcloud instance and the Android app automatically backs up photos taken with the stock camera app to my server.

It is waaay faster and supports AI classification (showing photos with a specific person, finding photos with a dog in them, etc), has some editing tools in the client apps, is generally nicer to work with. Its server can also work as a storage for their 2FA authenticator Ente Auth. Everything is open-source, data is E2E encrypted, stored in S3 (can use Minio ro Garage, for example). Uses Postgres DB.

Even though I use Nextcloud for documents, I have been using Photoprism [1] for a while now, and I like it very much. It isn't perfect, but so far it is the best solution for browsing my photos that I have been using.

You can host it yourself, and it has quite a range of features.

[1]: https://www.photoprism.app

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

I’ve been seeing this happen on older photos that had imported properly, and I just use my iPhone and view photos on my Mac and iPhone. Looking back, I’ve lost whole chunks of my photo library. It’s a bigger problem than I realized. I don’t have these backed up elsewhere.

I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.

I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.

You work in IT right? always backup

How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.

The solution to that is rolling backups with different tiers.

1 backup updated daily

every week you update the weekly backup

every month you update the monthly backup

every year you update the yearly backup

and so on or with whatever precise timings make sense for you

Keep at least the last two snapshots for each.

Also, do use error correction codes so you can recover partially damaged backups.

Are you kidding? I pay for iCloud as a service, 30$ a month for my family. I expect it to work and not corrupt my photos.

> Are you kidding? I pay for iCloud as a service, 30$ a month for my family. I expect it to work and not corrupt my photos.

The /s is missing. If you were serious, please check what backup means. I would hate to see you here, in a couple of years, with "Ask HN: Apple closed account without warning. How do i recover my iCloud photos ?"

Sounds more like what Apple users say than /s.

I hadn’t dug that far in to it, thanks for sharing! I assumed my rather old SD card or the adapter I keep stuffed at the bottom of my bag was the issue as I’ve only seen it on a couple of photos.

I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years.

I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.

Well, it might even be a bad sector in RAM or SSD somewhere.

Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.

Always count on Tenderlove for a detailed technical deep dive! I've missed your blog.

Tangential story - 12-13 years ago I was a burgeoning and super eager software dev that moved to Seattle to be closer to "the scene." tenderlove's content was a major reason for me going there and I poured through his posts learning way too much about Nokogiri, Active Record, and much much more.

I went to every Ruby meetup I could get to out there and I remember one in particular, a Seattle RB meetup, in the Substantial office. It was a pretty small group, at most 15-20 people.

I was with a coder buddy but knew nobody else. We were all just drinking pints of Manny's beer and eating pizza from Big Mario's or something. Ryan Davis (the creator of minitest among other things) was doing a presentation on Unicode.

Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) was cracking jokes at every opportunity. At one point I asked a relatively naive question and Aaron _tenderly_ answered in joke-form response. I felt such a _part_ of the scene then. Aja Hammerly was super engaged in the presentation, I think even Ryan Bates and/or Geoffrey Grosenbach were there.

It was quite surreal to be in this dream-like state around giants and heroes just doing what they were doing and being so inclusive. It seemed so normal but became a core memory.

Thanks for everything Aaron, you've truly been an inspiration!

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.

That the workflow could be better does not really excuse the software corrupting the images. This is like the "you are holding it wrong" type excuse.

This bug is clearly Apple's fault, but no matter which software or OS you switch to, you'll encounter a bug eventually and you'll be glad to have a workflow that is resilient to that.

With Microsoft, you have to be very creative.

Apple corrupted images on my iPhone where I can’t import them to my PC via photos, but I can backup the whole phone.

They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(

Yeah, that's one of the billion reasons I'm sticking to Android phones with gasp file managers and shock expandable storage via an SD card slot.

I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.

But files are hard, scary and dangerous! What if a scammer asks Grandma to open the files app or copy photos directly to her pc!?

I had a similar issue recently. I used the Windows Photo app to import & delete photos from my iPhone. When it finished, I realized that a significant fraction of the photos had been corrupted. Not sure where in the pipeline it happened, or if they were already corrupted on the phone.

I realize it's easy to think or assume this is a bug affecting everyone but for what it's worth, I've had zero issues importing photos from my Sony a6000 and a7iii for the past eight or so years. Tens of thousands of photos at this point.

For the longest time my process while traveling was importing onto my iPad or occasionally my iPhone since I didn't have a personal laptop, just a Mac Mini at home.

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.

I am moving this direction, but for now as a redundancy purpose. Copied google take out into immich, who has its mountpoint use truenas iscsi backed by zfs. Zfs is set to take snapshots frequently.

Just a warning, I don't think that ZFS snapshots are sufficient for ZFS bitrot protection.

Ensuring ZFS has at least 2 copies on physically separate disks and using scrub frequently is the way, right?

Please correct me if I am wrong HN!

Right, zfs snapshots are for the case myself, or any of the software i use (e.g. immich) messes up something.

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 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.

I don't really get the syncing situation with apple. And it's really hard to tell when they've resolved bugs in one app or introduced new ones elsewhere.

The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.

I'd love to know how they CRDT hand-written notes.

Sounds like they don't.

You presumably would process the pen inputs, not the resulting image produced by the handwriting. No different from how you handle conflicts in online gaming.

Deleting your data is next level privacy.

> Deleting your data is next level privacy.

Yes, but not before syncing it with (NSA)iCloud. /s

I think of Apple as blessed and cursed by hubris. The same arrogance that lets them assert a design into the world on the belief that people will adopt it allows them to incapable of changing at the things they are bad or deplorable at.

I got burned by Apple purposely corrupting my music library. I'm still salty about it.

Purposely? Could you elaborate?

Still can't get rid of that U2 album I'm guessing

Oh that's easy, just download this extra piece of software which removes the album for you.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540

People, including me, had a lot of playlists of ripped cds and downloaded mp3s, all categorized, rated, and with years of play count history.

Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...

"Purposely" seems strong, though. Is it believed that Apple intended this corruption?

It is believed that the bug was ignored or deemed unimportant or worse because of apples preference for users purchasing music via their store, yes.

Happend to my father as well, his songs were all over the place with the same albums even sharded over multiple folders etc. A big mess. Left him pretty sour indeed, he had spend a lot of time on it.

Btw, it was fine from withing iTunes, just never stop using iTunes I guess...

Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.

This is a company that is trying to design away the concept of the file completely. Which leaves very little recourse in the way of workarounds or recovery when bad things happen.

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 driveway.

To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?

Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?

Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.

iTunes randomly changing album artwork happened to me too. Only thing that fixed it was wiping the iPhone and resyncing with computer.

The clipboard is no longer reliable.

Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?

Could be because of shared clipboard between devices?

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 the time as it used to.

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.

I’ve copied with right click out of chatGPT on Firefox and the contents not ending up on my clipboard. Not reliably.

Thats chatgpt doing ott wrapping and breaking web standards in a way chrome accepts but firefox doesnt last i looked

Clipboard managers help a lot there.

I just use KDE's default one, Klipper, and I raise the max entry number.

If something bad replaces your copy, you can get the good one back from the history.

There are nice features like QR code generation for your copied text if you want to quickly share something with someone else's phone as well.

That’s a really interesting solution to copy-pasting between devices, which is one of them features Apple has that I rely on a tonne even though it’s horribly unreliable. I wonder if anyone has a similarly clever way to copy from mobile to your computer.

KDE Connect provides some tight integration, including (optional) clipboard sharing, media player controls, features to do presentations, mouse and keyboard.

I use it as a remote control to adjust volume during movies from the phone to the computer playing them for instance.

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

On Linux you can just select the text and simply paste it using middle click. It works everywhere on Xorg, on some environments on Wayland. And it will only copy what you selected... everytime.

I completely agree about there being a fundamental design flaw.

I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.

There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.

You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.

> There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips

There are certainly other words for it. Lazy, anticompetitive, disinterested, any of those are more plausible than all of Apple being insane. They sold you a microchip that you knew you wanted, now they are beholden to little else. For over a decade, Apple didn't even offer the iOS APIs for third-parties to implement cloud storage. They know you need their software services, regardless of how shit they are.

Insanity would be a pretty satisfying explanation. Fickleness fits a lot better with Apple's track record though.

Apple's hardware is top class, but the software has always been lacking. The only time I've seen both in perfect synergy was when the iPod was released (and even then there was iTunes). Not even the iPhone reveal had that.

No ECC, no replaceable parts, software updates stop in a few years.

Apple's hardware is absolutely trash for anything that needs reliability. For shiny disposable entertainment use, it can be great.

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.

Another two examples:

* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.

* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.

* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.

* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)

Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.

But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.

Apple stole my entire music library. I have had one library going back to the first release of iTunes on Windows (2003?) — thousands of songs, most of them CD rips.

I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.

Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.

It's a real mess.

Yeah, I spend a night on writing some python to disentangle my un-amused father's music collection when he stopped using iTunes. What a mess.

Finder being unable to show file information and instead showing something that looks like file information but is completely wrong is scary and sad. And it has been like this for months. Like here, none of the data in the General part matches the actual file. More info is correct, Preview is correct, so I know I did in fact click the correct file. http://bn5i3r.s3.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-09-17-at-17-0... Happens randomly so I don't know how to report this (and from experience I know that reporting bugs to Apple is completely useless).

Its probably a good thing in a way if someone learns this lesson in a lesser painful way. You need to manage your own files and backups and content. Data portabillity is the opposite of what they want and try to further abstract away until people dont even know what a file or folder is. Its so easy, you dont even have to lift a finger until you decide you want or need to leave. Thats when you realize its sometimes impossible to take it with you

Funnily, "data security" encompass both protecting it from undesired access (and stealing) but also from loss/corruption.

So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)

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 involved.

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.

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 were staffed by engineers who weren't "quite as good" as the development teams, and it showed. Horrible QA tools that broke frequently, QA test passes that were fragile and took forever, and just low quality bug reports. Work that should have been automated just wasn't due to a lack of talent. Part of this is because any really good engineers who started off as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) ended up moving to the SDE career track after a few promos, because the career trajectory for an SDE was much better (despite the company trying to resolve this repeatedly over the years).

So basically the SDET teams had an ongoing brain drain problem.

That said, the good SDET teams were just as good, if not better, than the development teams. The really high quality test software was incredibly good. And when debugging means going through assembly code in a debugger and figuring out what is wrong, the top engineers come off looking like magicians.

But there was too much rot in the QA orgs for them to ever be agile enough for daily releases. Microsoft went with the cost cutting approach of just laying most of them off and allowing software quality to drop, as did the vast majority of other companies.

Once Microsoft got rid of their SDET career track, it became career suicide to even bother going into QA and the entire field basically died. Microsoft SDETs were on the same pay scale (and same hiring requirements) as SDEs. When i was in college my goal was to be an SDET at Microsoft, I loved the idea of being the last line of defense against bad software, of being the one responsible for protecting users around the world. (Yes I played a lot of Paladins in D&D, how'd you guess?)

I eventually achieved my goal, became an SDET on a compiler team, got to take over maintaining one of the most impressive test systems I've ever seen [1], and spent a lot of time wiping up my own drool as ARM assembly code scrolled while I tried to trace compiler bugs.

SDETs died, I moved to be an SDE. I loved being an SDET, I loved having a job that could be summarized as "be angry for the sake of the customer". I loved that I worked in a company where the most junior of SDETs could stop an entire build from going out by saying they didn't think the build met the quality bar for a release from Microsoft (something I actually did once, emotionally it is a hard thing to do!).

Unfortunately that love and passion for quality is gone from the industry.

[1]https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...

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.

This is infuriating to me. I manually manage my music library and have for years. I buy the iPhone with the most storage so I can keep my entire library with me locally. This used to work great, but has degraded over the last decade. Now when I drag new music to my phone in iTunes nothing happens for minutes, and then if I get lucky it finally starts transferring, but some times nothing happens at all and I have to retry.

Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.

> Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe...

How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?

It's worth saying their magic ability to sync everything across devices has basically ceased to exist at this point as well, and now I wonder if it ever did.

The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.

> I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem

Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.

Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.

I think there was a time when my iCloud name somehow got mixed with people with the same name. My name turned into all uppercase, and IIRC (long time ago) I found someone using that style that had the same name.

Dont cloud storage companies also link multiple owners of the same file (same hash or checksum or file identity) to avoid duplication also?

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.

Apple's Migration Assistant messed up timestamps when I did a M2 > M4 copy recently.

Dropbox doesn't seem to keep timestamps properly either.

I like using filesystem timestamps to sort through things in Finder, and thankfully I like A Better Finder Attributes for being able to batch copy EXIF data into timestamps.

[1] https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.ht...

> 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).

Something related: exporting originals from Photos used to give the current timestamp back in Ventura, which annoyed me to no end.

They fixed that bug in either Sonoma or Sequoia (I jumped straight from Ventura to Sequoia).

I had this with some old photos but you can quickly rsync preserving metadata and then use exiftool to fill in the time and the whole thing will always work. After that I pasted it in Google Photos and it’s correctly in the timeline. Remarkable how easy this stuff is these days with LLM.

> I had this with some old photos but you can quickly rsync preserving metadata and then use exiftool to fill in the time and the whole thing will always work.

Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but what's rsync's role in this?

Just in this “import to disk” vs “import to usb” thing from OP. Can just do former then copy it over. Nothing special about rsync. Just used as shorthand for copy because I don’t like working on the originals.

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.

Photos uses sqlite. I came across this but haven't tried them yet. https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries

There is also osxphotos for macOS.

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

> 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.

It's a folder that acts like a file.

Right click > Show Package Contents works, and there's an "originals" folder that should have all your photos in normal everyday files.

Instead of being organized by album, they're all thrown together with the filenames as UUIDs instead of the original name, or any useful name whatsoever. The editing steps I've applied to the raw files are, of course, not present. The important parts are all stuffed into a single giant .sqlite file, it looks like there may be other shared resources as well.

The point is that - from a data safety standpoint - it would be better if all of the internal metadata were persisted per album, if not per photo. That way one corrupted file would only affect a small subset, rather than causing me to lose the whole library.

Rookie numbers :) I know people whos pushing 1TB, mine is almost 500GB. I back it up to a mechanical HDD every now and then.

It would be very helpful to document the version number of the Photos app that demonstrates this behaviour so anyone else who is affected can use this article to keep track of potential fixes.

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec

Bit of context. Deleting after import is unlikely to have zero'd out the data on the SD - so using photorec would have allowed them to quickly and easily recover their pictures from the SD card.

Not "easily" as the filenames and metadata that associates them with the file contents would have likely been overwritten. Also, not sure how well photorec works with Olympus' RAW files.

iTunes plays audio files. It also has metadata for the audio: Artist, Title, album art, how many times a song has played...

It writes the metadata into the audio file. Badly.

In particular, it's that "Play Count": iTunes rewrites the audio file every time you play the song.

Usually it just corrupts the metadata enough to forget the album art. But it's perfectly willing to destroy the audio data.

Use photorec to recover from the old SD card even if you deleted

Then for the current files you’ll want to see what happened. Often with this class of problem either the bytes are zeroed or shifted. Since the size is the same, perhaps they’re zeroed or perhaps bytes are LE to BE or dumb shit like that (don’t know why it would be but weird world right).

Just diff and see if you see anything (I wrote off memory but you get the idea)

   diff -aui <(xxd -r file1) <(xxd -r file2)

If files are getting zeroed sucks but otherwise maybe you can swizzle it back out. If full bytes look weird, look at binary representation and see if you have pattern.

From that bare start you can see what’s up.

I recently bought a house and the seller included some slides from when he bought the house in 1993. They are still clear and visible, even without a projector. I highly doubt I will be able to share my iCloud photos in 2057.

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

Dumb, slow, corrupt

That describes 2025 too

People should stop using the Photos app. It is an application designed to lock you in first, make your life hard second, and manage your photos a far third. If photos are important to you, you should never ever put the master copies in an opaquely-managed proprietary container. It prevents you from auditing your files easily, it also prevents you from making backups in other media. Photos isn't even useful; leaving the photos as files allows you to pick multiple tools to manage them better.

I’m not a pro, but I use iCloud Photos to back up everything. This bug honestly makes me nervous. If something gets corrupted and I don’t even notice I might lose years of memories without knowing.

Might want to have some redundancy for that just in case. I would never trust them for something as important as that

That really is not a backup. You should store things in files (disk images or archives) and media that you control and can checksum. And which you know you can recover from without relying on any service, company, or download being available in the future. Make sure to replicate before the media rots and have redundant copies. That way, digital data can be kept unchanged indefinitely.

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.

Curiously, to me at least the image of the corrupted file was itself corrupted and not shown by my browser. Or maybe Apple didn't want me to see the corrupted file... :)

I have had raw files on an CF card that were corrupted by an import attempt. I never used iOS import again unless the card was backed up to a computer first.

Recently, importing via image capture has resulted in recurrent crashes. Files appear on Image Capture that do not appear on the iPhone, nor can they be downloaded via image capture, or deleted. I wish I knew wtfudge was going on.

I've stopped using photos entirely due to import bugs.

So much wasted time, now I just use image capture to import and organize directly.

Still get errors from time to time.

Apple needs to hire more quality control, their software integration is going from a positive to a negative.

Seamless integration was a large part of Apple's initial hook, and continues to be a part of their drive to push services, it should be a priority.

Back in 2011 I did the grave mistake of updating my iPad to the beta version of iOS. It was iOS 4 I believe. I took it with me on my honeymoon travel in US. My use case was to offload images onto the iPhotos app with an SD adapter. I bought the Apple Dock one.

On day 7 or so the import failed and all files on the pad got corrupted. But also the SD card got corrupted.

I stopped using the device and the card because I knew not all is lost. I had to buy a new card in SF as replacement. Back home I used a recovery software to check if data is still on the card (I used the same software before on a card that got deleted by another person and I was able to get all images back). I was able to get most of the images recovered and also recovered a few from the iPad. All in all I lost maybe 10 out of a few 100. Now I travel with multiple cards and backup already each night while in the hotel. And I don’t delete the images on the SD Card. I format only when I’m sure I have everything copied and secured.

> Bought a new laptop Bought a new camera: the OM System OM-1 MKii

I think he was just looking for an excuse to buy new kit

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.

I ran into the same corruption issue without any sort of RAW images and without using OM camera. My partner was pissed at me, thinking it was my fault. But it turns out that Apple Photos is to blame!

But OP says they tried different SD card readers. And, now that Macbooks have SD card readers and every desktop dock and type c dongle thing has one, who even uses the camera to transfer photos?

I stopped using the Photos App on Mac because of this, has happened on several occasions.

I shoot RAW but I wouldn't want to eat up all my iCloud space with my RAW files. They're 80MB each off of my Fujifilm camera. I store them on a local DAS instead. Curious what the real use case is for storing RAW on iPhoto.

Backups on the go. 2TB iCloud + wifi + sd card reader for iPhone.

No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups

You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple.

There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.

I learned the hard way to never delete photos from the SD. Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway.

Great article by the way, sounds like my kind of rabbit hole :)

> Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway

Not a good idea, you are going to have piles and piles of SD cards that will be hard to manage, and you will burn through $$$.

people have catalogued and tracked physical items for centuries without issue; a 1TB SD card is now $75 and can store perhaps a year worth of photos

I do the same (though not for personal photos, only for my professional wedding work). SD cards are small, I have a stack in a safe.

Every professional/paid client I shoot for, I do on new SD cards. I have dual slot cameras, so one card just permanently lives in my camera and gets formatted between shoots, the other I treat as a one-time use card.

Doesn't eat into my margin too much, and I appreciate the extra redundancy when dealing with someone else's wedding photos, so that if somehow something went catastrophically wrong with the rest of my back up process and off sites, at the very least I still have the SD card with the RAWs on it.

Gosh I hoped all wedding photographers thought to do the same...

You'd be surprised. I've seen and heard some real horror stories.

My $dayjob is IT/infrastructure ops, so backup hygiene is engraved in me as a core value. A shocking amount of people outside of tech have no concept of backups or redundancy.

Wow, I wonder if the same issue exists in the "Image Capture" app which I've used for years on my old MacBook to transfer photos off my iPhone. I would transfer everything off and occasionally find that some photos are inexplicably corrupted. The app itself is terrible, it regularly shows it imported an image but didn't, or it arbitrary imports a couple images completely randomly NOT from the ones I selected, so I end up with weird duplicates and stuff. :\

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.

Never has been. But seems they've managed to do some effective PR if people think they were.

What are some good Open Source / Self Hosted alternatives to Apple Photos (Desktop)? I pretty much keep my Mac Mini around solely to import photos from our phones, free up space on the phone, and backup the Photos DB. We like to go back and look at old photos from time to time too, and the feature that shows them on a map is a big one for us.

Last time I looked (pre-COVID) there wasn't a lot of promising options, and some didn't support HEIF images

I'm fond of digikam https://www.digikam.org/ it's simple enough for most users and has complex features for more advanced users its open source cross platform and doesn't do some weird rearranging of files so you can still use your file browser too.

This looks pretty cool, I'll take a closer look at this one, thanks!

Immich could solve what you are looking for. It supports wireless upload to the server, everything is stored locally and it has some neat additional features.

https://immich.app/

Looks pretty cool, this might be the ticket. Thanks!

Immich.app, with their import from iCloud CLI command to seed it: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command

Another commenter mentioned this and it look promising, thanks!

I use and enjoy PhotoPrism. It's open source and self hosted. It has the map view. It accepts imports via WebDAV, or you can manage files completely manually without using the import feature.

It's strictly for looking and exploring old photos. It doesn't do photo editing (except metadata editing), nor do I expect it to.

Thanks, I'll take a look at this one too.

for context, the author is Aaron Patterson of Ruby and Ruby and Rails fame, a proficient C programmer and overall hacker, he knows his stuff

I had a weird issue with at least one photo in Apple Photos recently (possibly more that I haven't found) where the photos app showed the image, but I couldn't export it - like it was only a preview. I've upgraded my photos database over many release so I don't know if that's a part of it, the photo in question was from 2018 or so

See if you can File->Duplicate Photo it first.

I have tried fairly persistently to make Apple Photos my primary photo management tool and I finally gave up recently. The app crashes repeatedly when I have it open—only occasionally until this year but the frequency has increased to the point that it no longer feels usable. A real shame. I’d rather stay in the ecosystem if I had the choice.

I remember years ago I lost some random videos on iCloud (synced via the Photos app). The filenames were there but they couldn't be opened anymore and seemed corrupt. Since then I never trusted iCloud anymore and switched to Syncthing (which back then also messed up some of my data if I recall correctly) and then Nextcloud.

It comes back to my fundamental philosophy that apple is the problem and we should abandon it until it shapes up

This is really good to know. I’ve never personally run into this problem despite having the same hardware because I only ever put the final jpeg into apple photos and keep the camera output completely outside of the Apple ecosystem on a hard drive.

It feels less of security related and and more of ecosystem lock-in related to be honest

Have you tried importing them using the Image Capture app on iOS, instead of the Photos app? It just gets them off the camera/SDCard and onto your Mac in a folder, which you can then drag onto Photos.app -- worth a shot.

Somewhat tangental, but I keep my music in the Music app. Wireless music sync is great and usually does what I need. Once in a blue moon, however, it'll absolutely scramble every album cover of every song I have.

Noticed that quite bit on old backups of large libs. Being just using Image Capture and backing up to filesystem!!! HD is probably a better medium time backup than some proprietary photo app.

Past few days, i created a copy of all my photos on google in my nas. This gave me a peace of mind in case something catastrophic happens (image corruption, account getting banned etc)...

For transferring files (photos or others) from iOS, I have been using Landrop for a while and never had any issues so far, it’s also way faster than using a cable.

I always wonder about the motivation behind these polished, high-quality programs on the App Store which are not open source, and also don't collect (much) data, neither have ads in them.

It’s open source, else I wouldn’t recommended it

https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop

I used it along with another called Localsend, but the later one gave me a bit of headache and crashed while transferring some large files last time I used it, but still great as an alternative too, and it’s open source as well.

Edit: Actually, you are correct, it seems they did close it! Try localsend instead.

Love LocalSend. Can be a bit finicky but for quick transfers between systems I love it. Use it so my work laptop, Linux gaming PC, and iPhone can easily pass staff around.

You figured out how to teleport people through local send?

Coming Eventually:TM:

For transferring photos from your Iphone to your Mac, you can also use the native Image Capture app.

This article is about importing photos from an SD card to MacOS

I use PhotoSync for images which works (most of the time ;) ) automatically in the background. Once or twice a month I give it a kick to make sure...

The headline should really note that this only affects people importing from a digital camera.

For the 99.999% of us who just use our phone, nothing to worry about.

Scared me for no reason! =P

And Absolute Apple Photos app corrupts images absolutely.

(sorry not sorry)

The recent degradation of Apple software quality is crazy

Changing the end of this headline to "corrupts some images imported from external cameras" would be longer but a lot less clickbaity.

I’ve never had this bad of corruption. But not surprised.

Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import.

Good sleuthing!

In the age of AI, apple should just open source these basic apps. They really don’t have anything to lose if they this.

Apple photos also distorts photos. It makes all celebrity selfies look they were driving in the UK.

I'm feeling dumb, but that seems a really different RailsConf than I was expecting.

See also the Image Capture bug from several years ago where it appends a ton of empty data to imported photos:

https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html

(I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)

Image Capture did me dirty once. Macbook ran out of space while importing photos but it never stopped and kept on deleting photos from my iPhone. Lost 5K photos of a wedding... submitted a bug and hopefully it has been rectified.

Image Capture hasn't had a delete after import checkbox for a few versions now, I think.

Fortunately it mentions early on in the article that this is related to an Olympus camera so I'm guessing this has something to do with the OM system's flavor of Olympus's proprietary ORF format.

This would not surprise me. For whatever reason, ORF files from the TG-4 import fine, but CoreRAW doesn't handle the TG-6, so I need to either use RAW+JPEG or convert to DNG.

iPhoto still works just fine, and I refused to move. And I never have it or anything else be the only place an image exists. Storage is cheap.

> iPhoto still works just fine

I wouldn't say that out loud. Apple's motto with software is move slow, break backwards compat anyway.

Im interested to see if you encounter the same with a different phone. Most probably a software issue, but are we sure it isnt something defective with your phone?

My read of the article is that they were importing photos from their camera to their laptop, so there's no phone involved anywhere here.

Apple is the new dogshit. Having serious issues with nearly every one of their offerings. Apple TV app needs to be logged in every time. iTunes plays video/audio out of sync. hardware failures on macbook pro / apple watch.

I've stopped buying apple stuff

I have Apple Photos but I never thought to use it to automatically import my photos and clean it up. My process is very similar to where you've ended up. Thanks for validating it--I'll never change it.

Photos has always corrupted stuff.

So restore your original images.

This bug has been there for years, probably a decade.

I got similar symptoms as mentioned, I suspected AFS+, but what do I know. It has happened on at least 3 iphones (pros), now when I think about it, I don’t remember any iphone I haven’t have troubles with. Having 5000+ images (non-raw) where 5-10% are corrupt is infuriating, but I just stupidly buy another iphone every year (the most expensive one).

Re-importing images 10-100 times could sometimes extract a few additional images, but the phone just disconnects after a while when running such scripts.

"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...

wait, it wasn't doing that already?

Imagine having the resources of Apple and not testing your software. We deserve better.

...just discovered DarkTable because of this! #win

“It just works”

WTF is that URL? I'm NOT clicking on that. LOL

He says the checksums are different but he doesn’t provide a diff to show how different. It could just be a single flipped bit or something. And that could happen in his own RAM/disk/CPU/router so seems premature to immediately blame Apple.

"I’ve not seen any file corruption when importing to Darktable, so I am convinced this is a problem with the Photos app."

Yes this argument is a bit unconvincing for me. Not saying Apple photos doesn't corrupt his files, but this is not real proper investigating either.

He switched out his laptop.

Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too.

That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.

Here you go!

  https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b

I ran both files through xxd then diffed them. I've literally changed every piece of hardware (at no small cost). "premature to immediately blame Apple" seems a bit off.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish my Binary Diff Tool was already completed, but unfortunately I'm still working on it. Can't tell much what's wrong with the differences in the bytes without knowing what the structure behind it is.

I tried running the file segments through a binary diff with Hex Fiend

As far as I can tell:

- 0x7800 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa0000

- 0x2200 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa8000

I can't tell if the replacement data came from a different part of the file, or somewhere totally different. Race condition somewhere sounds plausible.

gcd(0x2200,0x7800) = 512

So some part of the chain with 512 byte buffer size corrupted the data.

It doesn't look like a memory corruption but if this were my computer I'd run the equivalent of memtest86 on it.

It looks like a filing system corruption to me. Running `diskutil info` on the main harddisk and the sd card might be interesting to see if the block sizes match.

Running a disk tester on the sd card and the main disk might be a good idea too. Here is one I wrote: https://github.com/ncw/stressdisk

It's a shame APFS does nothing to ensure file integrity.

There's a corrupted photo at the top of the article and the non corrupt version at the bottom, is that not enough?

No, it isn’t. The OP isn’t questioning whether the file changed, but asking what changed to the file, not what changed visibly.

The visible effect shown could be due to a change as small as a single bit flip. It also could be that large parts of the file got overwritten, or that it partially got zeroed. The exact kind of damage can help pinpoint the cause of the problem.

> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.

That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos".

What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

I also use RAW+JPG. Latter part allows quick sharing without long post-processing, esp. for impatient friends.

If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.

JPG so you can also see the default camera processing which might be work well from time to time. RAW in case it doesn't.

> What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

You get to keep out of camera jpg files. Some people might like how their camera processes jpg files and might also want the raw file for a scenario when a more complex editing is needed.

Interesting, based on this and other replies, it sounds like Photos App should have an option to select what to import? i.e. RAW or jpg, but not both.

It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?

As I said in my blog post, it imports both and combines them in the UI. Also as I said in my blog post, I switched to shooting only in raw, and it still exhibited file corruption.

I commend you for your patience with this comment section.

I don't know why this is downvoted.

Because it's utterly irrelevant nitpicking, acting as if a blog post is something that was inflicted on hk1337, followed by a question about a pretty basic concept demonstrating a very limited understanding of the domain, which would be fine if the assumption of good-faith wasn't undermined by the preceding text.

> That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos"

Thanks dad.

Speed. It all comes down to speed.

Processing RAW can be expensive time wise. If you’re sorting through a session of 10,000 photos, you want the speed that comes with the jpeg variant, which allows you to quickly sort out blurry, smeared, severely mis-exposed, and other various defect photos.

The storage cost is negligible (JPEG75@10MP is cheap) and the workflow benefit is immediate. Additionally, cropping and early white balance corrections (as well as a handful of other things) are much faster to preview with a non-RAW version of the image; since you’ll be processing that detail later anyway from scratch in the RAW later, it’s functionally free to do it on the jpeg version before you dig into the raw.

Additionally, there’s a cheap debugging aspect that you saw here: was it Apple Photos mishandling ORF? Was it something else? When working with both, you have a “reference” that can be used to make sure your digital development pipeline is set up correctly; finer details about the imager can sometimes get mangled by some RAW developers like pixel order and sub pixel blending. Not every CCD is a linear grid, not every LCD looks the same, but if you can get your RAW pipeline producing ≈the same as your camera did, it verifies that you have things mostly set up correctly.

> Speed. It all comes down to speed.

GP isn't wrong though. Most cameras embed a medium quality full-resolution JPEG along a couple different thumbnails in raw files, so saving raw+normal JPG is kinda pointless, because the raw already contains that jpeg. Raw+jpg is only easier in the sense that many/most non-vendor tools - even viewers - can't properly handle the embedded jpg so it's easier to just duplicate the storage (e.g. 50 MB for the raw + 10-20 MB for the JPG) and take the hit on storage consumption/transfer time.

My Olympus camera only embeds 1MP thumbnails in RAWs, but my iPhone embeds full JPEGs.

It varies by vendor and sometimes even firmware revision.

Is this downvoted because of the last line i.e.

  What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

Otherwise, it is wise to highlight that "delete after import" is not a good choice in general.

I personally would not let device A to automatically delete files from device B while files are being copied from B to A.

My workflow is quite manual when bringing pictures in from camera to my MacBook.

- I simply take the SD Card from the camera and then use the SD Card reader on MacBook itself to copy the files (RAW + JPEG) into a working directory.

- Move just the JPEGs into Apple Photos library

- The ones which I think I can/should improve using RAW processing, are processed in DxO Photo Lab and exported to JPEG with a *_DXO.JPEG filename

- DXO Processed JPEGs are added to Apple Photos again. This time due to the naming scheme, the DXO processed JPEGs and camera baked JPEGs are next to each other which helps in quickly checking the results.

- Delete the camera baked JPEG once I am happy with DXO's output

Regarding...

  What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

...as others have pointed out. Shooting RAW+JPEG is like an insurance policy where if the camera was unable to produce a result which I would like to keep, I have the RAW to play with.

I only keep JPEGs in Apple Photos as all of my image library is backed up to iCloud and don't want that duplication.

RAW files get backed up to another SSD. Looking into a better backup for RAW files.

Also, since I switched recently to a camera which uses CFeB cards for best experience (but also has a SD card slot), the onboard SD Card reader on my MacBook will become useless for this once I get an external CFeB reader.

With SD cards relatively cheap I long thought about, why delete them at all. Just put them into a box after importing the images/when full. So you still have a physical backup.

Because it's a waste of money, space, effort, and nature as well as an unreliable backup that gives you a false sense of security. As well as a good way to leak information.

But yes, keeping the cards for a while and rotating a large pool can be a good approach. When they're in actual reliable ro-at-rest, checksummed, possibly encrypted, offline backup, the cards can be reused. (Always format in device etc.)

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