Apple Photos app corrupts images

https://tenderlovemaking.com/2025/09/17/apple-photos-app-corrupts-images/

by pattyj • 10 months ago

1214 410 10 months ago

tamimio2• 10 months ago

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.

actionfromafar• 10 months ago

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.

tamimio2• 10 months ago

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.

basejumping• 10 months ago

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

ratg13• 10 months ago

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

sib2• 10 months ago

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...

sitharus• 10 months ago

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.

itopaloglu83• 10 months ago

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

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

billyjobob• 10 months ago

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.

mobilemidget• 10 months ago

"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.

jsw97• 10 months ago

He switched out his laptop.

asksomeoneelse• 10 months ago

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.

tenderlove4• 10 months ago

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.

daemin2• 10 months ago

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.

jjcob• 10 months ago

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.

daemin2• 10 months ago

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

Someone2• 10 months ago

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.

deviation2• 10 months ago

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.

tenderlove4• 10 months ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 10 months ago

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.

strunz• 10 months ago

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

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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!

egorfine2• 10 months ago

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.

runjake• 10 months ago

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!

groos• 10 months ago

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.

girvo2• 10 months ago

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.

inanutshellus2• 10 months ago

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.

bluSCALE42• 10 months ago

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.

tuetuopay• 10 months ago

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

eviks• 10 months ago

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

I stopped checking the “delete after import” button

JoBrad• 10 months ago

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.

mentos2• 10 months ago

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

Someone2• 10 months ago

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.

loeg• 10 months ago

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.

aakkaakk2• 10 months ago

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.

BrtByte3• 10 months ago

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

jonny_eh• 10 months ago

Tests can be flaky, and then ignored

sixothree• 10 months ago

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

ChrisRR• 10 months ago

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

dcchambers• 10 months ago

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

privatelypublic• 10 months ago

Something something Railed.

copperx• 10 months ago

Why? It's brilliant.

brulard• 10 months ago

The URL might be mistaken for some different content?

crazygringo2• 10 months ago

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

kotaKat• 10 months ago

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”.

macintux• 10 months ago

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.

devnullbrain• 10 months ago

Infohazard warning:

C++ reference is one of these.

layer8• 10 months ago

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

coldtea• 10 months ago

As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?

cluckindan• 10 months ago

Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!

sholladay• 10 months ago

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...

JKCalhoun7• 10 months ago

Ha ha, I remember that name.

omnibrain2• 10 months ago

Modwiggler changed name around the same time.

anal_reactor3• 10 months ago

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.

Romario77• 10 months ago

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

rendaw• 10 months ago

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...

sgopalan98• 10 months ago

Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?

yard20102• 10 months ago

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

United857• 10 months ago

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.

moritonal• 10 months ago

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.

lloeki• 10 months ago

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.

therein• 10 months ago

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

lapcat3• 10 months ago

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.)

iamshs• 10 months ago

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.

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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

itake• 10 months ago

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 :(

alterom• 10 months 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.

freedomben2• 10 months ago

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!?

o_nate• 10 months ago

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.

hk13372• 10 months ago

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?

bayindirh• 10 months ago

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.

basisword• 10 months ago

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.

merelysounds• 10 months ago

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.

hk13372• 10 months ago

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?

formerly_proven2• 10 months ago

I don't know why this is downvoted.

cwillu2• 10 months ago

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.

tenderlove4• 10 months ago

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.

indrora2• 10 months ago

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.

formerly_proven2• 10 months ago

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.

stillworks• 10 months ago

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.

omnibrain2• 10 months ago

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.

a965• 10 months ago

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.)

asolove• 10 months ago

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.

BrtByte3• 10 months ago

Never thought to suspect Photos itself

CtrlAlt• 10 months ago

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!

dzink• 10 months ago

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.

mystifyingpoi• 10 months ago

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.

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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...

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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).

renewiltord3• 10 months ago

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.

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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?

kokey• 10 months ago

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.

BeFlatXIII• 10 months ago

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.

giancarlostoro3• 10 months ago

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

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

xd• 10 months ago

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.

account424• 10 months ago

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.

bluSCALE42• 10 months ago

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.

tmountain• 10 months ago

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.

_aavaa_• 10 months ago

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

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

josephg• 10 months ago

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

doodaddy• 10 months ago

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.

JKCalhoun7• 10 months ago

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

GuinansEyebrows• 10 months ago

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.

in_cahoots• 10 months ago

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

PaulHoule3• 10 months ago

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.

philsnow• 10 months ago

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

burnte• 10 months ago

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.

doctorpangloss• 10 months ago

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

softfalcon2• 10 months ago

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.

vitaflo• 10 months ago

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.

bichiliad• 10 months ago

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.

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

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

JKCalhoun7• 10 months ago

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

spuz• 10 months ago

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.

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

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

rwky• 10 months ago

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.

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

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

tom1337• 10 months ago

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/

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

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

sodality2• 10 months ago

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

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

Another commenter mentioned this and it look promising, thanks!

kccqzy2• 10 months ago

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.

mcflubbins6• 10 months ago

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

internetdrew• 10 months ago

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

maz1b• 10 months ago

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

kevwil• 10 months ago

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

myshkin5• 10 months ago

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.

montebicyclelo• 10 months ago

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.)

eptcyka• 10 months ago

You should’ve put an airtag on them first.

big_toast• 10 months ago

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.

skylurk• 10 months ago

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

cozzyd• 10 months ago

Deleting your data is next level privacy.

ajkjk• 10 months ago

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.

potatoproduct• 10 months ago

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

JadeNB2• 10 months ago

Purposely? Could you elaborate?

TomaszZielinski2• 10 months ago

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.

WD-42• 10 months ago

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.

xmddmx• 10 months ago

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.

1980phipsi• 10 months ago

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

ben_w• 10 months ago

The clipboard is no longer reliable.

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

crazygringo2• 10 months ago

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.

jmpz• 10 months ago

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.

anon7000• 10 months ago

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.

janfoeh• 10 months ago

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.

teekert2• 10 months ago

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.

borisgolovnev4• 10 months ago

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).

Obscurity43403• 10 months ago

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

n0n0n4t0r• 10 months ago

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;)

giancarlostoro3• 10 months ago

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.

kridsdale1• 10 months ago

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.

landonxjames• 10 months ago

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.

gokhan• 10 months ago

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?

fidotron• 10 months ago

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.

brailsafe• 10 months ago

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.

apt-apt-apt-apt• 10 months ago

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.

Obscurity43403• 10 months ago

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

MarkMarine2• 10 months ago

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.

kccqzy2• 10 months ago

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.

tomalbrc• 10 months ago

You work in IT right? always backup

bobbylarrybobby2• 10 months ago

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.

MarkMarine2• 10 months ago

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.

jcbe• 10 months ago

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.

Retinal7467• 10 months ago

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.

larusso• 10 months ago

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.

lo_fye• 10 months ago

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.

roc856a• 10 months ago

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.

kramer2718• 10 months ago

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.

thewebguyd4• 10 months ago

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.

hosteur2• 10 months ago

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.

concinds• 10 months ago

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.

driggs2• 10 months ago

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.

goalieca• 10 months ago

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

grgergo• 10 months ago

There is also osxphotos for macOS.

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

ValentineC8• 10 months ago

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.

driggs2• 10 months ago

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.

borisgolovnev4• 10 months ago

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

hosteur2• 10 months ago

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.

tehlike3• 10 months ago

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.

luke-stanley2• 10 months ago

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!

cmurf• 10 months ago

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.

tehlike3• 10 months ago

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)...

locao• 10 months ago

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

VeejayRampay• 10 months ago

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

yard20102• 10 months ago

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 :)

anon1395• 10 months ago

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 $$$.

sgammon• 10 months ago

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

thewebguyd4• 10 months ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

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

pandemic_region• 10 months ago

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

aakkaakk2• 10 months ago

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.

hn111• 10 months ago

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.

spike021• 10 months ago

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.

ImPrajyoth• 10 months ago

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

renewiltord3• 10 months ago

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.

reboot81• 10 months ago

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?

ericye16• 10 months ago

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.

BrtByte3• 10 months ago

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

BonoboIO• 10 months ago

Dumb, slow, corrupt

That describes 2025 too

xlii• 10 months ago

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.

luke-stanley2• 10 months ago

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!

borisgolovnev4• 10 months ago

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?

poolnoodle• 10 months ago

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.

a965• 10 months ago

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

theturtle• 10 months ago

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.

bapak• 10 months ago

iPhoto still works just fine

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

elliotec• 10 months ago

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!

anArbitraryOne• 10 months ago

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

amatecha• 10 months ago

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. :\

CharlesW• 10 months ago

"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.

chiefgeek• 10 months ago

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.

softfalcon2• 10 months ago

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.

gyomu• 10 months ago

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.

vladvasiliu3• 10 months ago

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...

otterdude• 10 months ago

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

trevorkoob• 10 months ago

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.

dkga2• 10 months ago

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... :)

nothrowaways• 10 months ago

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

LeoPanthera• 10 months ago

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

imagetic• 10 months ago

Photos has always corrupted stuff.

jamesgasek• 10 months ago

The recent degradation of Apple software quality is crazy

wormius• 10 months ago

And Absolute Apple Photos app corrupts images absolutely.

(sorry not sorry)

dbg31415• 10 months ago

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

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

abustamam• 10 months ago

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.

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

sfRattan3• 10 months ago

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.

cons0le• 10 months ago

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?

fmajid• 10 months ago

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

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

sfRattan3• 10 months ago

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.

rob_c• 10 months ago

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

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

jonahx2• 10 months ago

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.

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

muppetman• 10 months ago

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...

Atreiden• 10 months ago

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

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

crossroadsguy• 10 months ago

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.

m463• 10 months ago

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.

saagarjha• 10 months ago

Why is this relevant for this particular article?

neop1x2• 10 months ago

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

I am a happy self-hosting user.

drnick19• 10 months ago

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.

arendtio• 10 months ago

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

maipen• 10 months ago

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

zahirbmirza• 10 months ago

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.

stmw• 10 months ago

"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-...

zenmac• 10 months ago

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.

mulmen• 10 months ago

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.

ByteDrifter• 10 months ago

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.

Obscurity43403• 10 months ago

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

a965• 10 months ago

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.

intrasight• 10 months ago

So restore your original images.

watersb• 10 months ago

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.

pikuseru• 10 months ago

“It just works”

mjankowski• 10 months ago

wait, it wasn't doing that already?

dchftcs• 10 months ago

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.

Apple Photos app corrupts images

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