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.
"a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords"
montebicyclelo · 34m 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.)
big_toast · 6m 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.
eptcyka · 25m ago
You should’ve put an airtag on them first.
cwmoore · 11m ago
Yes, two or three to make sure.
deviation · 3h 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.
tenderlove · 3h 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.
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h 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.
alsetmusic · 4m ago
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?)).
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.
No comments yet
deviation · 2h ago
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.
dmd · 1h ago
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.)
SoftTalker · 10m ago
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 coursde I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.
RankingMember · 58m ago
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.
bryanrasmussen · 25m ago
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.
pants2 · 57m ago
I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.
dmd · 54m ago
A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.
devmor · 1h ago
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.
ryandrake · 35m ago
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.
latexr · 2h ago
> I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple.
From your description, your experience is quite typical.
lapcat · 2h ago
> 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.
imchillyb · 1h ago
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.
lapcat · 55m ago
> 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.
shermantanktop · 10m ago
? 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.
runjake · 13m 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!
ValentineC · 1h 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!
JKCalhoun · 46m ago
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.
strunz · 2h ago
Have you tried copying the files to the local disk before importing?
sib · 21m ago
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.
turnsout · 55m ago
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.
egorfine · 53m 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.
JKCalhoun · 41m ago
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.
ryandrake · 31m ago
> 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.
inanutshellus · 2h 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.
eviks · 10m ago
That's not everything that happened, a big non-replacement part
> I stopped checking the “delete after import” button
bluSCALE4 · 1h 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.
inanutshellus · 12m ago
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.
tuetuopay · 1h 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.
JoBrad · 1h 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.
mentos · 1h ago
Sounds like an argument for Apple to provide a new high-level media import framework?
Someone · 31m 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.
mentos · 2m ago
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?
driggs · 10m 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.
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.
kccqzy · 37m 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 · 33m ago
You work in IT right? always backup
doodaddy · 1h 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.
in_cahoots · 12m 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.
JKCalhoun · 38m ago
I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.
GuinansEyebrows · 34m 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.
ChrisRR · 3h ago
I feel like this is a URL that I don't want in my history
sholladay · 2h ago
There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time.
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
omnibrain · 35m ago
Modwiggler changed name around the same time.
JKCalhoun · 39m ago
Ha ha, I remember that name.
anal_reactor · 29m 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.
macintux · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Infohazard warning:
C++ reference is one of these.
Y_Y · 2h ago
See also: Experts Exchange, Pen Island
eru · 1h ago
There was also a website for a mole station, but I'm not sure if that one was satire.
No comments yet
layer8 · 2h ago
And she wasn’t suspicious of amazon.com? ;)
coldtea · 2h ago
As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?
cluckindan · 1h ago
Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!
sgopalan98 · 2h ago
Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?
copperx · 3h ago
Why? It's brilliant.
brulard · 2h ago
The URL might be mistaken for some different content?
k8sToGo · 2h ago
Well, then don't browse from the church computer
kotaKat · 2h 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”.
crazygringo · 2h ago
What's brilliant about it? What's the reference, for those of us unfamiliar?
rhgraysonii · 2h ago
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.
sombragris · 56m ago
"tender love making" and then the specific URL mention photos and corruption... it could look really bad!
meterogue · 43m ago
You are welcome not to visit it if you do not want to hear from a Rails contributor for over 10 years.
meterogue · 45m ago
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.
dcchambers · 3h ago
Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.
privatelypublic · 3h ago
Something something Railed.
MonkeyClub · 2h ago
Nah that's just a one off
hosteur · 9m 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.
tehlike · 6m 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.
asolove · 2h 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.
tehlike · 8m 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)...
spuz · 1h 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.
roc856a · 12m 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.
hosteur · 8m 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.
kramer2718 · 9m 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.
sitharus · 3h 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.
lo_fye · 20m 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.
larusso · 24m 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.
No comments yet
Retinal7467 · 25m 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.
jcbe · 32m 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.
dzink · 2h 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.
ValentineC · 57m 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).
mystifyingpoi · 2h 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.
ValentineC · 25m 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.
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 · 2h 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.
freedomben · 1h 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!?
tmountain · 1h 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_ · 1h 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 · 1h 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:
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 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.
rwky · 1h 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.
tom1337 · 1h 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.
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
JKCalhoun · 36m ago
See if you can File->Duplicate Photo it first.
giancarlostoro · 1h ago
> Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.
I stopped using the Photos App on Mac because of this, has happened on several occasions.
cmurf · 9m 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.
bichiliad · 1h 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.
CtrlAlt · 2h 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!
kokey · 2h 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.
billyjobob · 3h 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.
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.
jjcob · 2h 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.
daemin · 2h 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.
daemin · 3h ago
There's a corrupted photo at the top of the article and the non corrupt version at the bottom, is that not enough?
Someone · 3h 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.
asksomeoneelse · 3h 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.
jsw97 · 3h ago
He switched out his laptop.
mobilemidget · 3h 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.
bluSCALE4 · 1h 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.
lapcat · 3h ago
See also the Image Capture bug from several years ago where it appends a ton of empty data to imported photos:
(I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)
iamshs · 3h 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.
ValentineC · 55m ago
Image Capture hasn't had a delete after import checkbox for a few versions now, I think.
internetdrew · 1h ago
...just discovered DarkTable because of this! #win
tamimio · 3h 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.
sib · 13m ago
I use PhotoSync for images which works (most of the time ;) ) automatically in the background. Once or twice a week I give it a kick to make sure...
basejumping · 3h ago
For transferring photos from your Iphone to your Mac, you can also use the native Image Capture app.
actionfromafar · 3h 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.
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.
BolexNOLA · 3h ago
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.
k8sToGo · 3h ago
You figured out how to teleport people through local send?
BolexNOLA · 2h ago
Coming Eventually:TM:
ratg13 · 2h ago
This article is about importing photos from an SD card to MacOS
kevwil · 53m ago
WTF is that URL? I'm NOT clicking on that. LOL
hk1337 · 3h 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?
tenderlove · 2h 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.
indrora · 1h 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_proven · 6m 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.
merelysounds · 2h 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.
hk1337 · 2h 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?
tenderlove · 2h ago
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.
cwillu · 1h ago
I commend you for your patience with this comment section.
omnibrain · 34m 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.
bayindirh · 3h 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.
stillworks · 1h 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.
basisword · 3h 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.
formerly_proven · 2h ago
I don't know why this is downvoted.
cwillu · 1h 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.
Sure security is important but integrity is too.
"a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords"
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.
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.
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.
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html
Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.
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.
No comments yet
I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
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.
From your description, your experience is quite typical.
This was financed by equally massive technical debt.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Which means that if that bug has been present since the (now unsupported) Mavericks, tough luck!
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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 stopped checking the “delete after import” button
maybe the randomness is based on the other apps he's using at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://gearspace.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...
It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.
C++ reference is one of these.
No comments yet
I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.
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’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.
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.
No comments yet
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).
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.
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...
They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(
I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.
No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups
There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:
https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
Last time I looked (pre-COVID) there wasn't a lot of promising options, and some didn't support HEIF images
It's strictly for looking and exploring old photos. It doesn't do photo editing (except metadata editing), nor do I expect it to.
https://immich.app/
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/photoRec
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.
Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import.
Good sleuthing!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
Thanks dad.
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?
If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.
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...
...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.